Соляр Понс: Шерлок Холмс в новом свете

Fictional detective created by August Derleth

Solar Pons is a fictional detective created by August Derleth as a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Robert Bloch wrote of the series, "During a span of a century there have been literally hundreds of Sherlockian imitations, ranging from parody to direct duplication, but no one except August Derleth ever succeeded in capturing the essential charm of Doyle's original concept To Pons's exploits he brought not only expertise but evident expression of his respect, appreciation, and affection for the source of their inspiration. Viewed as Holmesian homage or as a character in his own right, Solar Pons became Derleth's personal guide to an enchanted time and place."

On hearing that Doyle did not plan to write more Sherlock Holmes stories, the young Derleth wrote to him, asking permission to take over the series. Doyle graciously declined, but Derleth, despite having never been to London, set about finding a name that was syllabically similar to "Sherlock Holmes," and wrote his first set of pastiches in 1928, which were published in The Dragnet Magazine in 1929. He would ultimately write more stories about Pons than Conan Doyle did about Holmes.

Pons is a pastiche of Holmes; the first full book about Solar Pons was published in 1945 titled In Re: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of Solar Pons. Like Holmes, Solar Pons has prodigious powers of observation and deduction, and can astound his companions by telling them minute details about people he has only just met, details that he proves to have deduced in seconds of observation. Where Holmes' stories are narrated by his companion Dr. John H. Watson, the Pons stories are narrated by Dr. Lyndon Parker; in the Pons stories, he and Parker share lodgings not at 221B Baker Street but at 7B Praed Street, where their landlady is not Mrs. Hudson but Mrs. Johnson. Whereas Sherlock Holmes has an elder brother Mycroft Holmes of even greater gifts, Solar Pons has a brother Bancroft Pons to fill the same role. Like Holmes, Pons is physically slender and smokes a pipe filled with "abominable shag." The covers for the books also depict Pons wearing the familiar Holmesian garb of a deerstalker cap and Inverness cape. The actual Sherlock Holmes also exists in Pons' world: Pons and Parker are aware of the famous detective and hold him in high regard. Whereas Holmes' adventures took place primarily in the 1880s and 1890s, Pons and Parker live in the 1920s and 1930s. Pons fans also regard Derleth as having given Pons his own distinctly different personality, far less melancholy and brooding than Holmes's. The Pons stories also cross over at times with the writings of others, such as Derleth's real life literary correspondent H. P. Lovecraft in "The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders," and with Carnacki the Ghost Finder, the fictional creation of author William Hope Hodgson in "The Adventure of the Haunted Library." Pons has several encounters with Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu, (referred to solely as "The Doctor"), in "The Adventure of the Seven Sisters," "The Adventure of the Praed Street Irregulars," and "The Adventure of the Camberwell Beauty." The tales in the Pontine canon can be broadly divided into two classes: the straight and the humorous, the straight being more or less straightforward tales of detection in the classic Holmesian mode, while the others—a minority—have some gentle fun, most notably by involving fictional characters from outside either canon (e. g., Dr. Fu Manchu); perhaps the most outstanding example is "The Adventure of the Orient Express,", which features thinly disguised versions of Ashenden, Hercule Poirot, and the Saint. Several Pons stories have titles taken from "unrecorded" cases of Holmes to which Watson alluded, including those of "Ricoletti of the Club Foot (and his Abominable Wife)," "The Aluminium Crutch," "The Black Cardinal," and "The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant." Others are variants on Holmesian tales, such as "The Adventure of the Tottenham Werewolf," paralleling (in some ways) Holmes' "Adventure of the Sussex Vampire."

After Derleth's death in 1971, further stories about the character were written by the author Basil Copper. The first four of these volumes were published by Pinnacle Books: The Dossier of Solar Pons, The Further Adventures of Solar Pons, The Secret Files of Solar Pons and The Uncollected Cases of Solar Pons (original UK title: Some Uncollected Cases of Solar Pons) (all 1979). A further two volumes of Copper's continuations were published by Fedogan and Bremer: The Exploits of Solar Pons (1993) and The Recollections of Solar Pons (1995). Fedogan and Bremer also issued a limited edition chapbook of Copper's preferred text of the story "The Adventure of the Singular Sandwich." Later, Sarob Press published two further volumes of Pons work by Copper: the novel Solar Pons Versus the Devil's Claw (2004) and a collection titled Solar Pons: The Final Cases (2005) which contains six stories, five being revised editions of earlier Copper Pons contributions, and one Sherlock Holmes story ("The Adventure of the Persecuted Painter"). Most recently, PS Publishing reissued all of Copper's Pons stories in 6 volumes, adding a 7th volume entitled The Solar Pons Companion, which contains related non fiction and assorted materials.

Copper also edited Derleth's Pons stories for Arkham House under the title The Solar Pons Omnibus. In addition to his extensive edits, in which Copper "rather controversially corrected many errors and adjusted many Americanisms," he arranged the stories in order of their internal chronology, rather than by release date. A later omnibus, The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition, was issued by Mycroft & Moran in 2000, reverting the stories to Derleth's original versions, and printing them in order of publication.

A society, the Praed Street Irregulars (PSI), was dedicated to Solar Pons. The Irregulars were founded by Luther Norris with assistance from Peter Ruber in 1966 in the style of the better known Baker Street Irregulars. The PSI produced a newsletter, later a journal, the Pontine Dossier, published by The Pontine Press between 1967 and 1977 for 15 issues. A branch, The London Solar Pons Society, was established in England headed by Roger Johnson. Other branches were established in other areas. Though it is not formally associated with the Praed Street Irregulars, publication of The Solar Pons Gazette began in 2006 as an online journal. In more recent times, Belanger Books has revived The Pontine Dossier as The Pontine Dossier: Millennium Edition, a print journal, with three annual numbers published to date.

The Twin Peaks character Cyril Pons is named after Solar Pons. David Marcum's book "The Papers of Sherlock Holmes", Volume II includes a story titled "The Adventure of the Other Brother," in which Holmes' Nephew Siger takes the name "Solar Pons" in order to make his own name, instead of relying on that of his famous uncle.