The Casebook of Solar Pons

The Adventures of Solar Pons, Book 5

By: August Derleth, Luther Norris

Narrated by: Christopher Kendrick

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.

A dozen new Pontine exploits round out the quintet in this book - from The Adventure of the Sussex Archers to The Adventure of the Innkeeper’s Clerk – and between these two tales are such memorable stories as The Adventure of the Haunted Library, The Adventure of the Intarsia Box, The Adventure of the China Cottage, The Adventure of the Crouching Dog, The Adventure of the Whispering Knights, and others, including among them The Adventure of the Missing Huntsman - in which Pons and Parker invade the fox-hunting country of England, and The Adventure of the Ascot Scandal, one of Pons’ briefest and most amusing problems.

To supplement the tales, the distinguished British author, Michael Harrison, contributes a monograph exploring the background of Dr. Lyndon Parker, and, in the course of so doing, explains the doctor’s semi-American English. And, finally, August Derleth has added an afterword in which he sets forth the facts about the origins of Solar Pons, admitting that it was never his “intention to do any considerable number of pastiches” and relating the circumstances surrounding the continuing numbers of the tales, ending happily with, “I cannot promise to write no more of them.”

The present collection brings the total number of the Pontine pastiches to 57 - one more than the total of the canonical short stories, of which a reviewer for The Louisville Journal-Courier wrote, “These tales recall, as nothing else has done, those delicious days and nights in Baker Street, days and nights that have vanished forever.” (From the original 1965 Mycroft & Moran edition dust jacket.)

©2018 Derrick Belanger (P)2021 Derrick Belanger