Solar Pons - Definition and Overview

Solar Pons is a fictional detective created by August Derleth as a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

Pons is quite openly a pastiche of Holmes; the first book about Solar Pons was in fact titled In Re: Sherlock Holmes. The similarities can hardly be missed: Like Holmes, Solar Pons has prodigious powers of observation and deduction, who 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's stories are narrated by his companion Dr. John H. Watson, the Pons stories are narrated by Dr. Lyndon Parker; the two share lodgings not at 221B Baker Street but at 7B Praed Street, where their landlady is not Mrs. Hudson but Mrs. Johnson. Most strikingly, where Sherlock Holmes has an elder brother Mycroft Holmes of even greater gifts, Solar Pons has a brother Bancroft to fill the same role.

It cannot be said, however, that Solar Pons is merely Sherlock Holmes with the name changed, for the important reason that Sherlock Holmes also exists in Pons' world: Pons and Parker are aware of the famous detective and hold him in high regard, but where Holmes' adventures took place primarily in the 1880s and 1890s, Pons and Parker live in the 1920s and 1930s (when Derleth began writing the Pons stories.) Pons fans also regard Derleth as having given Pons his own distinct different personality, far less melancholy than Holmes.

After Derleth's death in 1971, further stories about the character have been written by the author Basil Copper.