Sherlock Holmes Among the Fairies

My good friends Joel and Carolyn Senter, proprietors of Classic Specialties, were shocked to learn that I enjoyed Tracy Revels’s novel Shadowfall. I was a bit surprised myself. And I like the new sequel, Shadowblood, maybe even more.

On the surface, these books would seem to run contrary to my tastes. Pastiches almost always disappoint me because of their failure to convincingly imitate the original, often at a very basic level. It’s not rare to find Holmes and Watson addressing each other by their given names, for example, which they never did. In addition, many pastiche plots seem to me to be simply un-Holmesian, not the kind of case he took on in Canonical tales.

How in the world, then, could I enjoy a series of books in which Holmes is portrayed as half fairy? It took me a while to figure that out myself.

The answer has to be that these stories are so far from the original that I simply suspend disbelieve and don’t even compare them to the Canonical stories. This is some alternate-universe Holmes, not the one we know. Once I accept that, I can settle back and enjoy Tracy Revels's good writing and the excellent plot.

Shadowblood begins with a client who claims his daughter is more than 100 years old. Not surprisingly, then, the plot involves the fabled Fountain of Youth. That takes Holmes and Watson to St. Augustine, Florida, by way of Paris and Prague. The tale is well-researched and peopled with interesting characters that include a Seminole showman, a blind photographer, and the central figure in one of the most infamous murder trials in U.S. history.

All in all, suspending disbelief, I found it to be a fast and engaging read.

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?