Showing posts with label August Derleth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label August Derleth. Show all posts

Friday, January 19, 2024

Who the heck is Solar Pons?


August Derleth: The Solar Pons Omnibus (1982)
August Derleth. The Solar Pons Omnibus. 2 vols. Ed. Basil Copper. Drawings by Frank Utpatel. Foreword by Robert Bloch. A Mycroft & Moran Book. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1982.

The other day I ran across this strange pair of volumes in a local secondhand bookshop. Solar Pons? Who on earth could that be? I was, of course, familiar with the name of the author, August Derleth, from my extensive reading of the late H. P. Lovecraft, whose literary executor he was ... or claimed to be.

"Solar Pons", though ... "pons" is the Latin word for bridge, and "solar" for all things pertaining to the sun. Was the intention, perhaps, to suggest some kind of Bifrost-like bridge leading to enlightenment?


Richard Lancelyn Green, ed.: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985)

"God said: Let Sherlock be! and all was light ..."
- John Masefield


But enough of this trifling. "Solar Pons" is an avatar of "Sherlock Holmes", as I knew already from a scatter of references here and there. He isn't included in Richard Lancelyn Green's classic anthology The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as that collection is confined solely to stories using the original names.

But then that was Derleth's original intention, too:
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.
- Wikipedia: Solar Pons



Elementary (7 series: 2012-2019)


We've certainly become rather accustomed to updated film and television versions of Sherlock Holmes over the past couple of decades.


Sherlock (4 series: 2010-2017)



Sherlock Holmes (2 films: 2009 & 2011)



House, M.D. (8 series: 2004-2012)


And if you're tempted to query the presence of Dr. House in this grouping, what can one say of a man whose best friend is called "Wilson" (= Watson), and who's segued from a consulting detective to a consulting diagnostician? In any case, I've canvassed that subject extensively here.

Of the other three pictured above: Robert Downey Jr's steampunk version of Holmes; Benedict Cumberbatch's excessively cerebral, almost Alan Turing-like incarnation of the great man; and Jonny Lee Miller's New York-based junkie impersonation of the detective, I'm rather surprised to put on record here that at present it's Jonny Lee Miller who scoops the prize for me.

No doubt that has something to do with a serendipitous pairing with the dazzling Lucy Liu, definitely the most impressive Watson to date - so much better than Martin Freeman's petulant misery-guts, or even Jude Law's no-nonsense action man. In any case, for those of you who haven't seen it, Elementary is a very satisfying exercise in suspension of disbelief.


Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. (4 series: 1984-1994)


So what's next? Sherlock Holmes on ice? With an eventual total of 154 episodes, Jonny Lee Miller is now (according to Wikipedia) "the actor who has portrayed Sherlock Holmes the most times in television and/or film, overtaking Jeremy Brett (with 41 television episodes) and Eille Norwood (with 47 silent films)."

It may, however, interest you to know that Derleth wrote "more stories about Pons than Conan Doyle did about Holmes." Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories about Holmes, whereas Derleth wrote more than seventy stories (plus a couple of novels) about Pons.


August Derleth (1909-1971)


There are obvious similarities between the two. Pons lives at 7B Praed Street; Holmes at 221B Baker Street. Pons' companion in crime is called Dr. Parker; Holmes's Dr. Watson. Pons' landlady is Mrs. Johnson; Holmes's Mrs. Hudson. Pons' Inspector Jamison stands in for Holmes' Inspector Lestrade - et al. Each has a group of "Irregulars" who assists him in scouring the labyrinthine warrens of Old London Town ...

There are, however, significant differences as well. The Pons stories are set in the 1920s and 30s, starting just after the First World War. The Holmes stories are set some forty years earlier, in the twilight years of the Victorian era (with one significant flash-forward, in "His Last Bow," to a piece of espionage during the Great War). Pons frequently mentions his "great predecessor," and even comments on the resemblance of some investigation or another to once conducted by Holmes himself.

Nor are the other characters precisely interchangeable. Dr. Parker is a far more peevish and irritable companion than Watson, and there is far less sniping at the official police in the Pons adventures. Nor is Mrs. Johnson's sang-froid at the goings-on of her unusual tenant nearly as tenuous as Mrs. Hudson's.

Pons lives in a rather more cushioned fantasy world than his progenitor Holmes. He also encounters other heroes of the time, such as Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu, Agatha Christie's Poirot, Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, and even Leslie Carteris's Saint on various occasions, which might have the deleterious effect of breaking the fourth wall, but which nevertheless provides innocent amusement to fans such as myself.


August Derleth: The Casebook of Solar Pons (1965)


But are the stories themselves any good? Well, that's debatable. They're surprisingly readable. Pons is seldom at a loss when it comes to solving the neat little puzzles that present themselves to him (more often than not by an attractive young lady who "instinctively" addresses herself to him despite the presence in the room of the gloomy Dr. Parker). He often repeats classical Holmesian adages such as "the game's afoot", and is seldom seen without a deerstalker - an item of clothing invented by Doyle's illustrators rather than by the author.

Here's a list of Derleth's original collections:
  1. "In Re: Sherlock Holmes": The Adventures of Solar Pons (1945)
  2. The Memoirs of Solar Pons (1951)
  3. The Return of Solar Pons (1958)
  4. The Reminiscences of Solar Pons (1961)
  5. The Casebook of Solar Pons (1965)
  6. A Praed Street Dossier (1968)
  7. Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey (1968)
  8. The Chronicles of Solar Pons (1973)
All of the stories in these books, including the novel Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey, are included in The Solar Pons Omnibus (1982), pictured above.


Basil Copper (1924-2013)


The story doesn't finish there, though - not by a long chalk. After Derleth's death in 1971, the character was revived by British horror and detective writer Basil Copper (author of Necropolis, among many other titles). He went on to write a further eight volumes of Solar Pons adventures, initially with the cooperation of Derleth's estate, but later on his own:
  1. The Dossier of Solar Pons (1979)
  2. The Further Adventures of Solar Pons (1979)
  3. The Secret Files of Solar Pons (1979)
  4. The Uncollected Cases of Solar Pons (1979)
  5. The Exploits of Solar Pons (1993)
  6. The Recollections of Solar Pons (1995)
  7. Solar Pons Versus The Devil’s Claw (2004)
  8. Solar Pons: The Final Cases (2005)
Most challenging of all to true believers, however, was his editing of The Solar Pons Omnibus. As well as breaking the continuity of Derleth's original volumes into approximate chronological order (as in William Baring-Gould's similarly controversial Annotated Sherlock Holmes), Copper, an Englishman, also "corrected" faults of orthography and idiom in the stories themselves! Not very assiduously, it must be said, given the number of solecisms they still include.



As a result, The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition was published in 2000 by Mycroft & Moran. It restores the original text as it was before Basil Copper's edits, and includes - as well as the six collections and one novel in order, the full text of A Praed Street Dossier (1968), as well as The Final Adventures of Solar Pons (1998).

To the 71 canonical stories by Derleth included in the 1982 Solar Pons Omnibus, then, one should add the following supplementary publications:
  1. The Unpublished Solar Pons (1994)
  2. The Final Adventures of Solar Pons (1998)
  3. The Dragnet Solar Pons et al.: Original Pulp Magazine and Manuscript Versions (2011)
  4. The Novels of Solar Pons: Terror Over London and Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey (2018)
  5. The Apocrypha of Solar Pons (2018)
  6. The Arrival of Solar Pons: Early Manuscripts and Pulp Magazine Appearances of the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street (2023)
The last in the list (it should be stressed) is simply a revised and expanded version of The Dragnet Solar Pons.

So what is one to conclude from all this? That some people have far too much time on their hands? That the idea of fan fiction goes back far further in time than one might have supposed (as far back as Cervantes in the 17th century, at least ...) That the Transatlantic battles between American Sherlockians and English Holmesians now have their echo in the battle between these two warring omnibuses? (Or is the correct term omnibi? Basil Copper would know ...)

If you're curious to know more about Solar Pons and his adventures, I strongly recommend the website, http://solarpons.com/, devoted to him and his adventures. Its creator, Bob Byrne, who is clearly a pop culture fanatic after my own heart, has also written a good introductory article, "The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Solar Pons" (17/11/2014), on his blog Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature.

I certainly don't regret purchasing Basil Copper's handsomely bound and curated collection of the Solar Pons mysteries - not to mention the many happy hours I've spent poring over its contents. There are only 60 actual Holmes stories to read and re-read, after all, and even a somewhat watered-down version of his mythos such as this can be very entertaining.

I'm also trying very hard to tell myself that I don't need the (even rarer) Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition, but if anyone has a copy for sale at a reasonable price, you could do worse than drop me a line in the comments section below ... There's no fool like a bibliophile, as the saying has it, and I have to plead guilty to the imputation.






Saturday, October 27, 2018

Classic Ghost Story Writers: H. P. Lovecraft



It's tempting to be facetious about the strange worlds of H. P. Lovecraft, "the twentieth century horror story's dark and baroque prince," as Stephen King famously described him.

I think a quick peek at the picture above will cure you of any notion that Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was gifted with much of a sense of humour. Life, for him, was a terrifying and frustrating business.

Here's a little photo-montage to enable you to visualise him more clearly:



What kind of a writer was he? An over-the-top, boots-and-all, pedal-to-the-metal user of every adjective and adverb under the sun to get the extreme effects he craved. His prose may not always be pretty, but it does have a certain brute effectiveness to it.

Here's an example of his early fantasy writing, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," a long novella deeply indebted to Lord Dunsany:
Well did the traveler know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colors of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.


And here's a piece of his more mature writing:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.


I guess what those of us brought up on his stories relish most, though, are the fragments of unknown, hellish languages he liked to mix into his stories. Here's a wonderful example from 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', cunningly blended with New England dialect:
"Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside—that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful—Order o' Dagon—an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn—"


Steve Thomas: Innsmouth


He's best known for his creation of a thing called the 'Cthulhu Mythos': a more-or-less consistent, interconnected mythology which gradually came into being in such stories as 'The Call of Cthulhu' and 'The Dunwich Horror,' and reached its full flowering in the late novel 'At the Mountains of Madness' and his final completed story 'The Shadow Out of Time'.



The artist Steve Thomas has created a series of mocked-up travel posters for particularly significant Lovecraftian destinations:



Steve Thomas: Arkham, Massachusetts


Chief among them, of course, is Arkham, Massachusetts, home of the Miskatonic University, whose library boasts a copy of that most recondite of volumes The Necronomicon, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and a source of considerable inconvenience to everyone who encounters it, whether in the original or in its variously expurgated translations into a myriad of tongues.



Abdul Alhazred: The Necronomicon


Arkham (allegedly a blend of Salem, Massachusetts, and the author's hometown Providence, Rhode Island), has more than its fair share of demons, hauntings, empty graves, corpses with their faces gnawed off, spectral beasts, and even radioactive meteorites from outer space.

Nor is there any sense in pretending that Lovecraft was just playing around with these things for poetic effect. His paranoias and neurotic fears were very real. Take, for instance, the following conversation about "H. P. Lovecraft's Phobias" on Yahoo Answers!:
Question: I've heard that Lovecraft had various phobias, what were they?

Best Answer:
  • Gelatinous seafood and the smell of fish (severe).
  • Unfamilar types of human faces that deviated from his ethnic norm (severe).
  • Doctors and hospitals (mild).
  • Large enclosed spaces (subway systems, large caves etc., mild).
  • He also seems to have had a mild phobia about tall buildings and the possibility of being trapped under one after a collapse.
  • Very cold weather (probably justifiable, since he tended to faint in it).
- Source: David Haden
If you'd like to know more about that or other recondite matters, you could do worse than consult the following tome, by the indefatigable Leslie S. Klinger, annotator of Sherlock Holmes, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Alan Moore's Watchmen and a host of others:



Leslie Klinger, ed. The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (2014)


  • Klinger, Leslie S., ed. The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. Introduction by Alan Moore. Liveright Publishing Corporation. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2014.

The main thing to emphasise is that this strange mixture of aesthetic recidivism, obsessive compulsion, and perverse white supremacism somehow combined into a body of work almost as influential on the twentieth century as Poe's was on the nineteenth.

If you think I'm exaggerating, just try googling "H. P. Lovecraft in popular culture" sometime.

Nor is his fan base entirely confined to readers of comics and pulp paperbacks with their caps on backwards (a proud group of human beings I'm happy to belong to: with the exception of the cap, that is). He recently joined the very select company of the Library of America, the only twentieth century horror writer as yet to do so (with the exception of the comparatively high culture Shirley Jackson):



H. P. Lovecraft. Tales, ed. Peter Straub (2005)


  • Lovecraft, H. P. Tales. Ed. Peter Straub. The Library of America, 155. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2005.

One of the most pleasing of the recent tributes to his influence is Alan Moore's remarkable series of comics set in a slightly alternative America of the 1930s:



Jasen Burrows: Providence 3 Cover (2015)


  1. Neonomicon. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2011.
  2. Providence: Act 1. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Issues #1-#4. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2017.
  3. Providence: Act 2. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Issues #5-#8. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2017.
  4. Providence: Act 3. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Issues #9-#12. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2017.



Jacen Burrows: Providence (2017)


Composed in his characteristic cross-genre mix of 'straight' comics and associated prose pieces and appendices, Moore's narrative described the odyssey of a hapless journalist over a thinly disguised version of Lovecraft's New England, resulting in the usual dire consequences for the entire human race.

Let's just say that these comics go some places that other fan fictions seldom do. They take a good look at Lovecraft's xenophobia and misognyny but pay full tribute to the power of his mythopoeic imagination, also. Not always to comforting effect, it should be said:



Jasen Burrows: Neonomicon 3 Cover (2010)


Beyond that, I have to say that I can't help but find amusing some of the Lovecraftian spoofs that seem to throng the web. This one, for instance, parodying those 'Sea-monkey' adverts so madly attractive to us as kids - when we were lucky enough to come across a stash of bona fide American comics, that is:



I guess that a lot of the 'shoggoth' references, and mentions of the "Great Old Ones' - not to mention 'Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos', or 'Shub-Niggurath, Goat with a Thousand Young', or even great Cthulhu him - it? - self, don't really make much sense to the uninitiate, but this one, at least, has a pleasing brevity to it:



And these are all very sound rules if you ever be unfortunate enough to find yourself caught in the midst of a Lovecraftian scenario:



On and on and on they go: Lovecraftian ice-cream flavours, carnival exhibitions, you name it, it's there:





But back to the serious world of bibliomania and book-collecting. I still remember the disquieting experience of asking in a Takapuna bookshop if they had any Lovecraft books, only to be solemnly informed by the shop assistant that not only did they not, but that she doubted the very existence of such books. I recall the slightly roguish expression on her face when I brought out the dread syllables 'Love-craft,' and the distinct impression she gave that I was on some kind of subterranean quest for porno. Fat chance in the New Zealand of the early 1970s!

To add insult to injury, I'd seen those very books in that same bookshop only a month or two before. So her denials were, to say the least, somewhat disingenuous. When I tell you that what I'd seen was something like this, though, you may understand better her reluctance to engage with such "literature." God bless pulp cover illustrators!



H. P. Lovecraft. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories (1973)


Never mind. In spite of the opposition of such petty minds, I eventually managed to assemble the six garish paperbacks which constituted the Master's collected horror fiction:
  1. Lovecraft, H. P. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. 1951. London: Panther, 1970.

  2. Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror. 1966. London: Panther, 1973.

  3. Lovecraft, H. P. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. 1964. London: Panther, 1973.

  4. Lovecraft, H. P. The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales. 1964. London: Panther, 1970.

  5. Lovecraft, H. P. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. 1967. London: Panther, 1973.

  6. Lovecraft, H. P. The Tomb and Other Tales. 1967. London: Panther, 1974.



If you looked carefully enough (I did), you'd observe that these six paperbacks actually constituted trimmed-down, British versions of the following three American hardbacks, all edited by by Lovecraft's most faithful disciple August Derleth, and published by Arkham House, the firm Derleth started to perpetuate the Master's work after his untimely death at the age of 47.



H. P. Lovecraft. The Dunwich Horror and Others (1963)


  1. Lovecraft, H. P. The Dunwich Horror and Others: The Best Supernatural Stories. Ed. August Derleth. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1963.

  2. Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. Ed. August Derleth. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1964.

  3. Lovecraft, H. P. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Ed. August Derleth. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1965.



H. P. Lovecraft. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1965)


The first two collections of Lovecraft's work issued by Arkham House are now fabulously rare and valuable. Here they both are (I'm sorry to say, if you're wondering, that I don't own copies of either of them):



H. P. Lovecraft. The Outsider and Others (1939)




H. P. Lovecraft. Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943)


Note the advertisement, above, for a book by Clark Ashton Smith, who, along with Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, constituted the 'Big Three' of the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales, which flourished - largely because of their work and that of other members of the Lovecraft group - throughout the early to mid-1930s.

There are innumerable modern editions of Lovecraft - many of them 'corrected' or at least re-edited by horror story polymath S. T. Joshi:



Leslie Boba: S. T. Joshi (1958- )


  1. Lovecraft, H. P. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. 2001. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.

  2. Lovecraft, H. P. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.



Ludwig Prinn: De Vermis Mysteriis (1809)


There's also a weird, less easily classifiable penumbra of works 'edited by' Lovecraft (this was indeed the main way he made his meager living), or 'based on' his manuscripts, or 'inspired by' his themes (particularly those embodied in the Cthulhu mythos). I have a small collection of these, but the field is a vast one:



August Derleth (1909-1971)


  1. Lovecraft, H. P., & August Derleth. The Shadow out of Time and Other Tales of Horror. London: Victor Gollancz, 1968.

  2. Lovecraft, H. P., & August Derleth. The Lurker at the Threshold: A Novel of the Macabre. 1945. London: Victor Gollancz, 1968.

  3. Lovecraft, H. P. & Others. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Ed. August Derleth. 1975. London: Grafton, 1988.

Then there's the miscellaneous and secondary literature. There are collections of letters, of poetry (including his masterwork in this form, 'Fungi from Yuggoth'), of essays, of virtually anything you please. There are also numerous biographies and critical studies.

Of these I have only the first, somewhat dismissive one by L. Sprague de Camp, along with Colin Wilson's pioneering essay of 1962. Since then, however, the field has expanded vastly, due initially to the combined efforts of Derleth and Joshi, but now thanks largely to the incremental effect Academia tends to have on all such harmless pursuits:



L. Sprague de Camp: Lovecraft: A Biography (1975)


  1. De Camp, L. Sprague. Lovecraft: A Biography. 1975. London: New English Library, 1976.

  2. Wilson, Colin. The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination. 1962. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1982.



Colin Wilson: The Strength to Dream (1962)