Solar Pons Series

In these pastiches of the sacred writings, written when he was 19 and 20, August Derleth has recreated the London of Sherlock Holmes. It does not matter that the familiar name has become Solar Pons, or that the familiar Baker Street has become Praed Street - something of the nostalgic charm and fascination, of the remembered quickening of the pulse and the familiar settings of the original London of Sherlock Holmes, has been recaptured in these pages. And what intriguing titles there arc to these 12 pastiches, chosen from among a greater number!

This second collection of pastiches of the immortal Sherlock Holmes offers 11 adventures of Solar Pons, who has been called by Vincent Starrett "a clever impersonator, with a twinkle in his eye, which tells us that he knows he is not Sherlock Holmes, and knows that we know it, but that he hopes we will like him anyway for what he symbolizes." Once again in the London of years ago "the game is afoot."

It will be good news to many devotees of the deductive story - particularly the pastiche of Sherlock Holmes - that Solar Pons is back in a third major collection after a lapse of seven years. In his introduction to this collection, Mr. Smith echoes the sentiments of many readers and listeners when he says, "These pastiches come the closest of any that have been written, consistently, to capturing the true flavor of the Holmesian saga and to making its people and its places and its happenings entirely credible."

Once more the most successful of pastiche-detectives, Solar Pons, walks on stage with a new sequence of adventures. In this fourth major collection, Solar Pons is engaged with an intriguing variety of problems - the curious puzzle of the antique sovereign boxes narrated in the novelette, "The Adventure of the Mosaic Cylinders"; the sanguine riddle of the body in the 13th coffin told in "The Adventure of the Mazarine Blue"; the perplexing matter of the man devoted to British bowlers - "The Adventure of the Hats of M. Dulac"; and others.

The steadily expanding devotees of the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street will hail with delight this crowning volume in a series of collections which have now pastiched the entire quintet of the master’s adventures. Here is another collection of “as sparkling a galaxy of Sherlockian pastiches as we have had since the canonical entertainments came to an end,” as Vincent Starrett - who contributes a preface to this book - wrote in his introduction to the first collection of the adventures of Solar Pons 20 years ago.