A Valentine to Solar Pons

One of the used books I picked up in New York during the Baker Street Irregulars & Friends Weekend last month is A Praed Street Dossier. It’s August Derleth’s fascinating little coda to his Solar Pons saga, revealing information about “the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street” not covered in the stories.

“Without exception, the Solar Pons stories have been written around titles,” Derleth writes in a chapter called “The Sources of the Tales.” I’ve done that myself, notably a short story called “Dogs Don’t Make Mistakes.”  In another chapter, Derleth lists his favorite stories and those of his readers.

All of this had me thinking anew about Pons, who is almost but not quite Sherlock Holmes, as I have written before. I turned two friends and dedicated Ponsians for their take on the character. First, Bob Byrne:

Why Solar Pons? I wrote an essay with that very title. You can read that one here.

Derleth created Pons because he enjoyed the Holmes stories and Doyle informed him there would be no more. Which proved to be the case. We all know of Doyle’s rather harsh feelings towards his greatest creation. Derleth was a successful author in several fields who enjoyed writing about Pons and Dr. Parker. His non-fiction writings about Wisconsin and his efforts in the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos were much more important to him. 

But whereas one can see Doyle’s lack of interest in stories like “The Mazarin Stone,” Derleth's professionalism and fondness for Pons shine through from the first story to the last. And Derleth was a very good writer – so he produced very good stories.

But Pons is more than just a shadow of Holmes. He’s less obnoxious and he’s willing to consider the supernatural, though he’s inclined to the rational solution. His humor is less acerbic. I find Pons much more likeable than Holmes while still being a genius in his profession.

Derleth was a solid plotter. I am almost never disappointed with his story structure. And his ability to draw from real life was impressive. “The Adventure of the Golden Bracelet” was based on an actual archaeological scandal, as I wrote about here. It’s one of my favorites. “The Adventure of the Stone of Scone” is another example.

I've read all sixty of the original Holmes stories more times than I can count. And I like them. But I find Solar Pons to be a refreshing alternative to just poring over the Canon time after time. And while there are definitely some talented Holmes writers out there, I’m not sure any of them does it better than Derleth did.

I created SolarPons.com and my free, online newsletter, The Solar Pons Gazette, because I think every Holmes fan would do well to read the Pons stories. 

One Sherlockian who would agree is David Macum, who continued Derleth’s tradition in The Papers of Solar Pons, a short story collection published last fall. Says David:

What captivates me about Solar Pons is that his adventures embrace everything that’s great about the Sherlock Holmes stories so perfectly – the characters, the interactions, the settings, the types of mysteries – but they are presented in such a way that they go beyond the World of Holmes to reveal that such a world continued long after The Master had retired to his bees in Sussex. Pons very capably carried on Holmes’s work in 1920’s and 1930’s London, even as a number of other detectives, such as Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, also moved to fill the void.

I believe that Pons continued to have an existence beyond his initial connection to Sherlock Holmes because, like Holmes, his adventures – at least when they were initially being published – were occurring in a time that was contemporary to the readers, and thus had a great deal of authenticity.

Pons sprang onto the scene fully formed, with many of the same characteristics as Holmes in terms of appearance, method, and types of cases, and this immediately gave him validity. His chronicler, Dr. Parker, evinced the same narrative style as Dr. Watson. There were other similarities, such as setting – London for both of them, with similar lodgings, Pons’s at 7B Praed Street instead of Holmes’s 221b Baker Street rooms – and associates, such as landlady Mrs. Johnson instead of Mrs. Hudson, Inspector Jamison instead of Lestrade, and brother Bancroft instead of Mycroft.

By the time the first Pons adventure was published, Holmes’s cases had taken place decades in the past. The Pons stories – at least initially – were being recorded contemporary to when they were occurring, in that unsettled era between the World Wars. When first published, Holmes’s cases also had that same here-and-now feeling, with settings in places where people lived or could visit or walk by every day.

Although Derleth continued to Literary-Agent the Pons stories until his death in 1971, he always firmly recorded cases set between 1919 and 1939. However, the 1970’s weren’t that far away from the 1930’s, and the stories didn’t seem too far in the distant past. Now, with every passing year and decade, the era of the Holmes stories – and the Pons stories too – gets further and further away.

Doyle and Derleth had the advantage of being Literary Agents that dealt with matters set in times that they actually knew and had lived through, and that gave their efforts credibility. This is very apparent when reading about Holmes, and one has that same sense when enjoying the adventures of Solar Pons.

From Sherlock Holmes to Solar Pons

Bob Byrne and Dan Andriacco at Gillette to Brett IV 

More than a few Sherlockians are also fans of Solar Pons, “the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street.” One of the biggest Pons boosters in the Sherlockian community is my friend Bob Byrne, whom I met for the first time at Gillette to Brett IV last month in Bloomington, IL. I think you’ll be interested in his answers to the questions I put to him recently.

Who is Solar Pons for you – a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, the successor of Sherlock Holmes, or who?

That’s the question, isn’t it? I think he’s both. Vincent Starrett said that Pons was the best substitute for Sherlock Holmes known. That’s pretty good. Anybody wanting that Sherlockian feel can get it by reading Pons (who is Edwardian, rather than Victorian). But in my essay, Why Solar Pons?, I talk about how Pons is more than just a carbon copy of Holmes. So, Pons gives us what we look for in those 60 Holmes stories, but he gives us even more than that. I use the phrase ‘variations on a theme.’ And August Derleth is simply a very good writer; he did far more than just create another Sherlock Holmes.

http://solarpons.com/Pons_Why.pdf

How did you first encounter Solar Pons?

Back in the eighties and into the nineties, pastiches weren’t all that common and generally only came out from big publishers. So I snagged about everything I saw: L.B. Greenwood, Michael Hardwick, Frank Thomas, Larry Millett, et al. Along the way, I grabbed a used copy of Pinnacle’s The Adventures of Solar Pons. But it sat on the shelf, even after I read Derleth’s Sherlockified version of The Adventure of the Circular Room in Marvin Kaye’s The Game’s Afoot. But sometime after 2000 I cracked open The Adventures and bought all the other Pinnacles from Derleth and Copper: I was hooked.

You’ve written that you prefer Solar Pons to Sherlock Holmes. Please explain.

I’d guess I’ve got at least 300 Holmes/Doyle/Victorian mystery-related books: I remain a huge Holmes fan and still write Baker Street Essays, my free, online Holmes newsletter. But Derleth liked Pons: we know Doyle’s attitude towards Holmes. I think that comes through in their works. And while Holmes is the original, I like that Pons is less arrogant, more open to the supernatural; that Inspector Jamison isn’t quite the buffoon that Lestrade is and that Derleth put more effort into plotting than Doyle did sometimes. I also like reading about Pons solving Watson’s untold tales.

What other characters do you like?

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe is actually my favorite mystery series of them all. Others standouts

 include Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police books, Will Thomas’ Barker and Llewellyn series and I’m a hard boiled aficionado, old and new. I highly recommend James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, Michael Stone’s Streeter, about anything by Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee (and everything else he wrote), and other pulpsters. I’ve actually read more fantasy/sword and sorcery than mystery, so that’s a whole other article, but Glen Cook’s Garrett PI books combine Nero Wolfe, hard boiled, and fantasy: that’s no easy task!

You seem to have so many writing projects I can’t keep up with them. Where do you blog regularly?

Www.BlackGate.com was kind enough to let me start writing a Public Life of Sherlock Holmes column every Monday morning. The unprecedented popularity of Holmes made it a good time to pitch such a column. It also didn’t hurt that I could point out the many fantasy and sci-fi authors who have visited Baker Street, as well as the supernatural bent of many pastiches, which fits their readership. I also try to post weekly to my own Holmes/Pons-centric blog, Almost Holmes at http://almostholmes.wordpress.com/

Do you also write fiction?

I’ve written some Holmes pastiches and parodies, but just for fun. And the 2015 Solar Pons Gazette will feature new pastiches from myself and two other writers. Someday, I’m going to put everything aside and finish the Holmes novel I’ve outlined and tinkered with for over a dozen years, based on a famous murder. I’ve also done some groundwork for a Solar Pons novel about the Oscar Slater case, but I’d like to have the Estate’s permission to publish that one, rather than just posting it online.

What are you working on right now?

Well, there are two SP Gazettes and one Baker Street Essays underway. And I’d like to get back to adding more content to www.SolarPons.com, the only website dedicated to The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street. There are two projects that I’d like to complete and publish for sale. First, I’m writing about a character that will be to Nero Wolfe what Pons is to Holmes. And second, I’m working on a study guide to Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which is my favorite book of the Bible.

Thanks for letting me talk about Pons! If the Derleth Estate would put the tales out in e-book format, I think Pons could regain his popularity in this new Sherlock Holmes Era.

Bridge of Light

Solar Pons is quite a character, and I don’t know quite what to make of him.
Probably any serious student of Sherlock Holmes knows that Solar Pons, a name that means “bridge of light,” is usually thought of as a pastiche of the Master – simply Homes under a different name.

In part, that was certainly true. August Derleth, then a 19-year-old from Wisconsin, started writing the first of the Pons tales in 1928 after being assured in a letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that no more Holmes stories would be coming from him. Pons has his own faithful Boswell (Dr. Parker), a brother (Bancroft), a housekeeper (Mrs. Johnson), and a frequently alluded to address in London (7B Praed Street).

Derleth wrote 68 Pons stories, which exceeds the Holmes Canon by eight. In the final collection, The Chronicles of Solar Pons, which I just read, there are references to Pons wearing an Inverness cape and a deerstalker hat (which was never said of Holmes in the original stories, but never mind). Chronicles also contains at least two stories inspired by references in the Conan to famous unrecorded cases of Sherlock Holmes.

Despite all this, Solar Pons is not quite Holmes. His adventures, even the ones written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, all take place in the 1920s and 1930s – the generation after Sherlock Holmes. Pons even refers somewhere to “my distinguished predecessor.” And in one of the Chronicles, he is called “the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street.”

I like Vincent Starrett’s observation that Pons “comes to us with a twinkle in his eye, which tells us that he knows he is not Sherlock Holmes, and knows that we know it.”

Pons has his own following – the Praed Street Irregulars and a series of Pons pastiches by Basil Copper. I agree with his fans that the best of the Pons stories are well worth reading. And I am strongly attached to one particular Pons book in my library for a reason that has nothing to do with its literary merits.

Many years ago, at a library sale, I bought a book called Three Problems for Solar Pons. It was published in a limited edition in 1952 – three weeks before my birth – under the impression that these would be Derleth’s last Pons stories. In reality, he continued to write them until his death in 1971 and these three stories were republished with others in The Return of Solar Pons.

The low print run of 996 copies makes Three Problems the scarcest of the Pons books. But if you would like a copy, a rare book dealer in Oregon has one for sale now for $450. Happily, I paid 25 cents for my copy.

What’s your take on Solar Pons?

Adventures in Book Naming

Naming a book of short stories can be a real adventure.

The first Sherlock Holmes stories ran in The Strand under the collective title of "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," with many of the story titles beginning "The Adventure of . . . " That became the book title as well for the greatest collection of detective stories ever written.

The next dozen stories carried the same "Adventures" banner in The Strand, and all but one were collected as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. That book title is a misnomer, though, when you stop to think about it. These may be memoirs about Holmes, but they are memoirs of Dr. Watson.

Both Adventures and Memoirs are deeply imprinted on my consciousness as titles associated with Sherlock Holmes and his creator. So much is this so that for many years I believed that Arthur Conan Doyle's autobiography was called Memoirs and Adventures rather than the actual Memories and Adventures!

The first five collections of Solar Pons short stories were designed to mirror the Sherlockian Canon, even to the point of having the same number of short stories in each book as in the Canonical model. And so we have In Re: Sherlock Holmes - The Adventures of Solar Pons, The Memoirs of Solar Pons, The Return of Solar Pons, The Reminiscences of Solar Pons, and The Casebook of Solar Pons before The Chronicles of Solar Pons breaks the pattern.

But wait - Reminiscences? That reflects ACD's His Last Bow, which carries the little-used subtitle Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes.

The inevitable association with Sherlock Holmes makes Adventures such a great title for a collection of detective stories that Ellery Queen used it twice: The Adventures of Ellery Queen and The New Adventures of Ellery Queen.

Coming up with a creative title for a collection is such a daunting challenge that many authors (or publishers) simply name the entire book after one of the short stories. I was tempted to do that for the first (and so far only) collection of Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody mysteries. Instead, I called it Rogues Gallery because a rogues gallery is a collection, and because the first story in the book takes place in a gallery.

But G.K. Chesterton, in my opinion, wins the day for giving his Father Brown books of short stories a series of titles that are unique, memorable, and appropriate: The Innocence of Father Brown, The Wisdom of Father Brown, The Incredulity of Father Brown, The Secret of Father Brown, and The Scandal of Father Brown. And next year, I plan to reread them all.

Returning to Solar Pons

The increased attention and interest given to Sherlock Holmes in recent years has resulted in an avalanche of new books, many of them by London-based MX Publishing (my own publisher).


And yet, I am reading (or re-reading in some cases) the decades-old adventures of Solar Pons, who is - but also is not - Holmes under another name.

There's a reason for that.


One of my joys in going to Sherlock Holmes conferences is the opportunity to add to my librarian of Sherlockiana. Among the purchases I made from Kathy Harig of Mystery Loves Company at A Scintillation of Scions earlier this month was a set of the Pinnacle paperback editions of the Solar Pons books.


The set included eight books - all seven of the original books by August Derleth and a collection of Pons pastiches by Basil Copper. I knew that I already had four of the books, but I liked the idea of buying the entire set so that I could look at them on my shelves and remember the day I bought them.


Turns out, that was a very good decision. The books are in better shape than the ones I already had, even though some of them area earlier editions.


I wrote about Pons on this blog about three years ago. (Check it out.)  As I read my way through the stories, I have just a few additional observations.


More proof that Pons is not exactly Holmes (even though Derleth said he was) is that he's referred to as the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street within the stories themselves. The stories are also set in a later time period - just after Holmes fades from the scene.


But echoes of Holmes redound throughout the Pons canon in lines like "You know my methods; apply them" and "elementary." Many of the plots even echo Sherlock Holmes stories - but then, so do the plots of several later Holmes stories repeat plots of earlier ones! They are great stories nonetheless.


Baron Kroll is a Moriarty-like figure. Could he actually be Von Bork under another name?


Most intriguing to me is Pons's habit of pushing his lips in and out as he thinks. This is reminiscent not of Sherlock Holmes but of his rumored son Nero Wolfe. And, as Bob Byrne pointed out to me, Pons also pulls his ear like Humphrey Bogart!


Reading Solar Pons is great fun. It's even more fun to know that I own them all.

Sherlock Holmes or Solar Pons? Both!

My reading of the earliest issues of The Baker Street Journal, from 1946 and 1947, has yielded surprise after surprise - and all of them pleasant.

Vol. 1, No. 3, for example, includes a work of fiction I had read before, August Derleth's "The Adventure of the Circular Room." I turned to it with the pleasurable anticipation of spending some time in the company of Derleth's Solar Pons.

The Pons stories are often considered pastiches, and Pons himself simply Holmes under another name. But Pons devotees will tell you that the relationship between the two sleuths is more complicated than that and that Pons is more than Holmes.

At any rate, I lifted my eyebrow before the end of the first line of the story. What was this reference to "a year in the nineties?" The Pons stories all take place in the twentieth century, just after the last of the Holmes stories. But this was a Holmes story! That became clear when the sentence ended with ". . . brought to the attention of Sherlock Holmes."

It turns out that the story I had read as a Pons tale in The Memoirs of Solar Pons was first published as a flat-out Holmes pastiche in the BSJ and anthologized decades later in that form by Marvin Kaye in The Game 's Afoot. And yet . . .

There is a funny thing about that. A few pages into the original BSJ/Sherlock Holmes version of the story appears a sentence which starts, "Holmes sat touching the lobe of one ear with his long, bony fingers for a few minutes." This ear-touching, which always reminds me of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, is a typical gesture - of Pons, not Holmes!

The meaning of that I leave to your deduction.

That same issue of the BSJ has several other interesting elements: Manly Wade Wellman, in "The Great Man's Great Son," speculates that Sherlock Holmes sired a son - Jeeves, not Nero Wolfe! And James Bone writes a letter from Undershaw, Arthur Conan Doyle's one-time home, when it was being used as a hotel.

All issues of the Baker Street Journal up to 2011 are available on a single DVD as the eBSJ.

Sherlockian Pharmacist Mike McSwiggin

Mike McSwiggen, decked out for the Baker Street Irregulars dinner  

If you spend much time traveling in Sherlockian circles, sooner or later you will run into Mike McSwiggin, BSI. Mike is Second Most Dangerous Member (vice president) of the Tankerville Club of Cincinnati and one of the speakers at the upcoming Holmes, Doyle, & Friends conference in Dayton, OH on March 28. Let’s meet Mike:   

How and when did you first meet Sherlock Holmes?

I was in the first grade.  My school librarian saw me repeatedly grab Encyclopedia Brown and Hardy Boys books.  She suggested I try something different.  By third grade, I had read them all.

How and when did you become a Sherlockian?

In middle school, I started reading about mystery writers.  Then, at some point early in high school, I came across Baring-Gould’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes.  That opened up Pandora’s Box for me.  Explanations for terms that I didn’t know, theories about why certain things happened, and (probably most importantly) a chronology of the stories – all of these things just lit a fire inside me.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  I went to a few conferences (such as From Gillette to Brett), but kept to myself until I met Paul Herbert and all of the great folks at the Tankerville Club in Cincinnati.  Sharing this interest with other like-minded people truly made me a Sherlockian.

Your talk at Holmes, Doyle, & Friends will be about Solar Pons, who is almost but not quite Sherlock Holmes. How do you rate your interest and/or affection for Pons vs. Holmes?

Pons is certainly not quite on the same level for me as Holmes, but I do enjoy the stories very much.  The magic of the Holmes stories is the relationship between Holmes and Watson: two genuine friends who care about each other and happen to have adventures and solve mysteries.  The language of the stories, the atmosphere, and the genuine goodness of the main characters all set the original Holmes stories at the top tier of detective fiction.  The Solar Pons stories are pastiche – good pastiche – driven far more by mystery and plot than building up atmosphere or characterization.  At their best, the plots are outstanding.  However, they rarely achieve the same emotional complexity as Holmes and Watson.  But that is a very high bar.  I recommend the Pons stories to any Holmes fan who needs more than the 60 stories in the Canon.

And where does Nero Wolfe fit in there?

Ah, now Wolfe is another thing entirely.  The Wolfe and Goodwin stories (which is really what we should call them, especially if I’m saying Holmes and Watson) are the only other stories I put on the same level as the Canon.  We’re both Wolfeans, Dan.  We fell in love with the language of Rex Stout.  It drives me crazy that so many fans of twentieth-century American literature always mention Hemingway and Chandler, yet omit Stout (the word “omit” is a nod to fans of Wolfe).  When at his best, Stout could write RINGS around those two!  I love Chandler, too, but Stout seems to have been forgotten by too many.  The plots weren’t always tops and the two main characters didn’t age in the many decades covered by the books, but so what?  I smile every time I read Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, and I have read them all multiple times.  Any fan of Holmes and Watson (especially those who read the stories for the relationship) should give Wolfe a try.

Your BSI investiture is “a seven per cent solution” in homage to your profession as a pharmacist. How has that profession affected the way you read the Canon?

Well, I certainly have a better understanding of the poisons mentioned in the Canon than when I first read the stories as a kid.  I did a presentation at A Scintillation of Scions last year entitled “Pharmacy in the Canon,” where I went through the state of pharmacy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, as well as talked about every drug and poison mentioned in the Canon.  It is actually pretty chilling the lack of understanding so many in medical world had regarding the substances they were prescribing or recommending.  That’s not to say we live in a perfect world now, by any stretch, but we have a better understanding of how things work.  But honestly, part of what drew me to mysteries is what drew me to pharmacy: I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and am always trying to turn chaos into order.  That is essentially what a detective in a story does: he or she is presented with a problem that needs to be solved.  The world needs to be made right (at least this small piece of it).  So, too, must a pharmacist (or anyone in the medical field) solve a problem presented to them.  Of course, I rarely meet engineers with nine digits, but I do try to help make things better where I can.

Although you and I both live on the same side of Cincinnati, we’ve crossed paths in numerous other cities at scion meetings and at conferences. What Sherlockian groups do you belong to?

Well, our home scion is the Tankerville Club of Cincinnati, of course.  I also belong to the Agra Treasurers of Dayton, the Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis, the Six Napoleons of Baltimore, the Sherlockians of Baltimore, the Denizens of the Bar of Gold (Eastern Shore of Maryland), the Hounds of the Baskerville (sic) in Chicago, the 140 Varieties of Tobacco Ash, the Fourth Garrideb, the Diogenes Club of Washington, DC, and the Baker Street Irregulars.

What’s your favorite Sherlockian event?

As much as I love the Birthday Weekend in New York, I think I have to be honest and say From Gillette to Brett in Bloomington.  Steve and Mark (and everyone else in Indiana) do such an amazing job there.  The guests, the presentations, the movies on the big screen – all fantastic!  Which reminds me, I haven’t nagged Steve and Mark yet this year about when the next one is happening…

What has it meant to you to be part of the far-flung Sherlockian community?

It really means more to me than I can say.  I work a lot, I have a child with special needs, and I don’t have a lot of other hobbies.  I spent a long time reading everything I could get my hands on that involved Holmes, but I never knew the joy of sharing it with others (face to face).  When I finally got the nerve to start attending Tankerville Club meetings, I really began to understand the community aspects of this obsession hobby.  And that has made such a difference to me. Two or three folks in my personal life have said that I am a happier person as an active Sherlockian.  And they are absolutely right.

What is your Sherlock Holmes guilty pleasure?

Without a doubt, it is the much-panned Hound of the Baskervilles starring Tom Baker (BBC, 1982).  Is it great?  Nope.  Does it add an original twist, like Brian Blessed as Geoffrey Lyons in the Ian Richardson version from 1983?  Nope.  Is it at least commercially available on DVD in the United States?  No.  It is the Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who, chewing scenery.  And the title sequence is a cartoon, for some unknown reason.  But I love it anyway.   

You can still register here to take part in Holmes, Doyle, & Friends on March 28, with an opening reception on March 27. 

The Adventure of the Unique Satirists

“I have never failed to read a Solar Pons adventure with satisfaction and pleasure,” the great Vincent Starrett wrote. Clearly, the admiration was mutual. “The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians,” from the title on, is a call-back to Starrett’s classic Holmes pastiche, “The Adventure of the Unique ‘Hamlet.’”

Like the Starrett story, “Dickensians” is “a good-humored satire on book collectors,” as my edition of “‘Hamlet’” says. Each story features two bibliophiles and (spoiler) a forged book or manuscript. “You know my opinion of collectors,” Pons tells Parker. “They are all a trifle mad, some more so than others.” This echoes Holmes’s comment near the end of “‘Hamlet’”: “They are a strange people, these book collectors.” Even more telling is the opening scene, where Watson tells Holmes “surely here comes a madman” in reference to their future client.

Both stories open with a view of the street, with Pons calling Parker to the window in “Dickensians” and the reverse in the Starrett story. And both end with a measure of forgiveness on the part of the client.

“Dickensians,” as even a Watson or a Parker could deduce without reading the story, is also a tribute to another great British writer. The client is Ebeneezer Snawley, who has more in common with Scrooge than just his first name. This “Christmas Carol” sendoff is an element that is completely lacking in “‘Hamlet.’” But “‘Hamlet’” was first published privately for Christmas 1920 – exactly when “Dickensians” takes place. A coincidence? I think not!

These two great short stories have one other commonality: They represent some of the best work of their respective authors. Reading them is a pleasure that does not diminish with repetition. 

This short article appears in the last issue of The Solar Pons Gazette, an impressive and fascinating journal of Ponsiana edited by Bob Byrne. It's a heavy 54 online pages, and this piece appears on page 44. You should read the whole issue!

Some Sherlockian Christmas Reading

"I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season."
- "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle "


Re-reading "The Blue Carbuncle" is a yearly habit for many Sherlockians, and "compliments of the season" their favorite greeting at this time of the year. Christopher Morley famously called it a "Christmas story without mush." Basil Rathbone on the radio and Jeremy Brett on television both gave us fine dramatic versions.


Although this great tale of crime and forgiveness is the only Christmas story in the Canon, there is no shortage of Christmas-themed reading material with a Sherlockian twist. A few examples:

• Holmes for the Holidays and More Holmes for Holidays, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenbeg, and Carol-Anne Waugh, are collections of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. As with most collections, the quality is variable, but some of the stories are quite good. (It's amazing how many ways Scrooge can be brought into a Holmes story.)
• "The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians," as noted here previously, is one of my favorite adventures of Solar Pons, who both is and is not Sherlock Holmes. It appears in The Chronicles of Solar Pons.
• Any Christmas annual issue of The Baker Street Journal.  
• "Christmas Eve," a one-act Sherlock Holmes play with only four characters by S.C. Roberts. It's not long and it's not great, but it's interesting. You can find it in Roberts' Holmes & Watson: A Miscellany, published in 1953.
• "Santa Crime," a Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody story with all the mush that's missing in "The Blue Carbuncle," appears in my book Rogues Gallery.

And still there must be more. What have I forgotten?

More Sherlock for Christmas!

Watson and Holmes Christmas ornaments

Philip K. Jones, whose scholarship has been lauded on this blog, wrote to complain about the paucity of my Sherlockian Christmas reading list. On this Christmas Eve, I'm happy to share his communication with you. Keep in mind that Phil maintains a mammoth database of Sherlockian pastiches with 10,205 entries.

Dear Dan:

I looked at your latest Baker Street Beat and I was appalled.  I thought you may have missed a number of Christmas tales, so I decided to check the database.  I had to give up when I was about halfway through because of the sheer number of items I was finding.  At that point I had identified forty short stories, three poems, two novels, four parodies, 2 Plays, two half-hour radio scripts, one full-hour radio script, one half-hour TV program, two extra-short short stories and two game scenarios.

There are at least two other anthologies with a high Christmas content; David Ruffle's Tales from the Stranger's Room and Gwendolyn Frame's Have Yourself a Chaotic Little Christmas.  There is also a second Solar Pons Christmas tale, "The Adventure of the Stone of Scone" from The Return of Solar Pons.  Another note;  Edward D. Hoch wrote a fifteen or sixteen Sherlockian-related tales and at least four of those are Christmas-based.  The Beaten's Christmas Annual, which is produced every year by The Sound of the Baskervilles, generally includes several pieces of Christmas fiction, which, over the years, has come to some twenty or thirty tales.

I finally gave up as I was running out of space to take notes.  I enter "XMAS" in Column D for Christmas tales, just as I enter the Christ codes for tales including elements of the Canonical tales or those telling "Untold Tales."  Check the data base if you are curious.  I expect the number will easily exceed a hundred.

Fortunately, Dec. 12 is just the first day of Christmas. We have 12 more to read all that!