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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Science Fictional Solar Pons

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Science Fictional Solar Pons

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OffTrail_SnitchA few weeks ago, I wrote about the best of all Holmes pastiches, August Derleth’s Solar Pons. I mentioned that Pons had a more open-minded view towards the supernatural. This was certainly reflected in four stories that Derleth co-authored with noted science fiction writer Mack Reynolds.

Just last week, John O’Neill wrote a post about Anthony Boucher. As he mentioned, Boucher, along with J. Francis McComas, was the founder of the seminal Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

In January of 1953, they wrote to Derleth. Reynolds had submitted “The Adventure of the Snitch in Time,” a pastiche in which Sherlock Holmes receives a visitor from an alternate time-space continuum. The editors loved the idea, but, “Unhappily, Mack did not in any sense of the word recreate Holmes, Watson, or Baker Street! Outside of the plot idea, the story was, to be wholly frank, lousy!”

Also, to avoid trouble from those pesky Doyle brothers, none of the characters were named: wholly unsatisfactory.

So, the two editors wrote to Reynolds, suggesting that they have Derleth rework it into a Solar Pons story. Reynolds loved the idea, sending back, “I’d appreciate it if you’d give Augie Derleth first chance at it. It was after reading his Solar Pons stories that I got the idea for Snitch. Besides that, I’m an admirer of the old Seigneur of Sauk City and it would be a privilege to have a story appear under a collaborative by-line…”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes for Christmas

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes for Christmas

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HolmesXmas_HolidaysOf the sixty Sherlock Holmes tales penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only one is set during the holiday season. “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” takes place two days after Christmas and involves a worn bowler hat and a goose worth more dead than alive.

That story doesn’t actually have a whole lot to do with Christmas; it just happens to occur shortly afterwards. However, there are a few books in my Holmes library that definitely qualify as Christmas adventures.

One of my favorite anthologies is 1996’s Holmes for the Holidays, which includes fourteen Christmas-themed adventures. Any Holmes anthology is likely to be a mixed bag. However, I consider this to be among the better of the multiple-author collections on my Holmes bookshelf.

Loren D. Estleman’s (author of Holmes pastiches featuring Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde) “The Adventure of the Three Ghosts” is a sequel to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Texan Bill Crider (give his Dan Rhodes mysteries a whirl) also continues the Scrooge story with “The Adventure of the Christmas Ghosts.”

William DeAndrea’s “The Adventure of the Christmas Tree” is a neat piece of Christmas-themed espionage. While Anne Perry’s “The Watch Night Bell” is one of my favorite Holmes holiday stories.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Solar Pons

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Solar Pons

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Pons_ReturnPinnacleThere have been a few posts here recently about fan fiction. That concept has been taken to its furthest extreme with the character of Sherlock Holmes. Amateur and professional writers have been penning tales about Holmes for about a century.

Parodies are stories that poke fun at Holmes. Many, such as this one I wrote (page 10), utilize Holmes himself and are clearly tongue in cheek. Others use “new” characters, such as Robert Fish’s Schlock Holmes and his Bagel Street Saga.

But the more serious Holmes tales, those that attempt to portray Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective to varying levels, are called pastiches. Just about the earliest ‘serious’ attempt at a Holmes copy was by Vincent Starrett, who wrote “The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet” in 1920.

The Doyle sons (whom I wrote about here) didn’t like pastiches and they’re relatively uncommon during the first half of the twentieth century as they protected their copyright. The Doyle Estate has been fighting over the copyright right up to this month!

Richard Lancelyn Green’s The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects many of the early pastiches, including several from the nineteen forties. There are thousands of pastiches out there now. Search “Sherlock Holmes” or “Sherlock Holmes anthologies” at Amazon and you’ll get a list too big to go through. A future post will talk about some of my favorite pastiches, such as Frank Thomas’s Sherlock Holmes & the Sacred Sword and Michael Hardwick’s Prisoner of the Devil.

But this post is about the detective that Starrett called “The best substitute for Sherlock Holmes known”: Solar Pons. In 1928, August Derleth, a college freshman at the University Wisconsin, wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, asking if there were to be any more Holmes tales. Receiving an emphatic reply of “no” scrawled on his own letter, Derleth made a note on his calendar: “In re: Sherlock Holmes.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Was Holmes Fooled in The Abbey Grange?

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Was Holmes Fooled in The Abbey Grange?

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Abbey_FDSI wrote about Playing the Game in a prior post about “Charles Augustus Milverton.” I much prefer this kind of Holmes speculation to the currently trendy erotic fan fiction that BBC Sherlock seems to have inspired in frightening amounts. As Holmes himself said, “unmitigated bleat!”

WARNING – THIS ENTIRE POST IS A SPOILER. If you haven’t read “The Abbey Grange,” click here and do so before continuing on.

In “The Five Orange Pips,” Holmes says “I have been beaten four times – three times by men, and once by a woman.” Might not “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” provide us the opportunity to add one to that count?

The facts as Holmes accepts them in this case: Sir Eustace Brackenstall is presented as an abusive husband when drinking. Lady Brackenstall (real name, Mary Fraser) had met First Officer Jack Croker on a voyage from her native Australia to England.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Elementary is Back

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Elementary is Back

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Elementary_PosterIn September of 2012, Elementary debuted on CBS television in America. It was a modern day Sherlock Holmes series, set in New York City. It followed closely on the heels of the BBC’s Sherlock, which had aired three episode seasons in 2010 and again in 2012.

The BBC series was a clever updating of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories (at least, it was until the third season) and was full of Easter eggs to please old school Holmes fans (like me), while appealing to a new generation (including females who swoon at the sight of Benedict Cumberbatch: ‘Cumberbunnies’).

Elementary sprinkles in bits from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works, but it’s really a police procedural with a Holmes overlay. I think it’s inaccurate to say it’s based on Doyle’s stories.

Holmes is a recovering drug addict who sleeps with women. Watson is, well, a woman who starts as Holmes’s life coach. Mycroft is nothing like the original and his relationship with Sherlock has even less to do with the stories.

Irene Adler and Moriarty were completely transformed. Gregson (who was the best of a bad lot) is actually a competent policeman, which is a nice change. On the other hand, there are bits for Sherlockians, such as Holmes keeping bees on the roof and being an expert single stick fighter.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The List of 7 by Mark Frost

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The List of 7 by Mark Frost

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List_fullcoverMark Frost made the news not too long ago with the announcement that he and David Lynch will be making a new Twin Peaks series for Showtime. Yay! Twin Peaks came to an abrupt end in 1991: just after its second season. Frost apparently wasn’t one to let grass grow under his feet, as only two years later, The List of 7 hit bookshelves.

John O’Neill wrote about (mostly the cover…) this book last year.

Frost is absolutely a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Not only is the novel’s protagonist none other than Arthur Conan Doyle and bits of his life are scattered throughout, but there are Holmes-isms aplenty. Thus, this book is a type of pastiche, though darker than any straight Holmes tale I’ve read.

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The Solar Pons – Fu Manchu Connection

The Solar Pons – Fu Manchu Connection

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200px-OTSolarPonsOmnibusExpoloits_of_solar_ponsMy colleague Bob Byrne has already introduced many new readers to August Derleth’s wonderfully tongue-in-cheek exploits of the unlikely-named Sherlock Holmes-inspired consulting detective, Solar Pons of Praed Street.

Derleth loved tossing in nods to mystery works outside of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional universe. These included three memorable encounters with Sax Rohmer’s insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.

“The Adventure of the Camberwell Beauty” was the first of the appearances to see publication in 1958. The story presents an unnamed Dr. Fu Manchu hiring the celebrated consulting detective to recover Karah, his beautiful young ward, who has been abducted by his archenemy, Baron Corvus. The tale is set in the early 1930s and although the first chronicled, it is not our heroes’ first encounter with the Devil Doctor.

Structured as a tribute to Rohmer’s 1933 novel, The Bride of Fu Manchu, the story reveals Karah (named for Rohmer’s Karamaneh) as the granddaughter of the Devil Doctor. Showing a nice bit of fidelity to Rohmer’s early tales, the unnamed Doctor resides in an underground Thames-side lair in Limehouse.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ellery Queen’s Misadventures of SH

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ellery Queen’s Misadventures of SH

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Misadventures_CoverYou’ve probably heard the name ‘Ellery Queen,’ but you may not know that it’s actually the name for joint efforts by cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. They were important players in the mystery field for decades, with Dannay being a notable Sherlockian.

In 1943, Dannay planned The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, an anthology of parodies and pastiches. Unlike today, Holmes anthologies were unheard of back then. Due in large part, as we’ll see, to the management of the Doyle Estate by Sir Arthur Conan’s sons, Adrian and Dennis.

The book, by Ellery Queen, was unveiled at a Baker Street Irregulars gathering in 1944. I gave a taste what dealing with Doyle’s two sons could be like in my post on “The Man Who Was Wanted.” There’s more of the same in this tale.

Adrian heard about the collection and went off in his usual rage, telegramming his brother Denis (also a wastrel) in Spain. Denis cabled the Estate’s law firm and instructed them to demand that Queen and the publishers, Little, Brown and Company, stop publication and withdraw all copies. They were also to be sued for damages.

To quote Denis’s cable to the lawyers: “It is obviously a flagrant example of that very sort of piracy, striking at the very roots of the literary value of the property which my father left to his family, against which we have fought together in the past…books which will completely devaluate and ruin the whole value of the Holmes property, including films, radio and stage.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The First Great Holmes (Gillette)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The First Great Holmes (Gillette)

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I recently wrote about John Barrymore’s film, Sherlock Holmes, which was based on William Gillette’s massively popular play about the great detective.

In 1897 or 1898, Arthur Conan Doyle decided to “revive” Sherlock Holmes, who had gone over the ledge at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893. He wrote the first draft of a play starring the detective.

Gillette_Poster1Since he already had scored a hit with his non-Holmes play, A Tale of Waterloo, Doyle must have figured that the public would ring up the cash register in seeing their favorite detective again: this time on the stage.

Doyle lost interest in the project, but his agent sent the five-act play off to noted Broadway producer and agent Charles Frohman. Frohman, who died aboard the ill-fated Lusitania, felt that the play was not commercial enough as it was and told Doyle that popular American actor William Gillette should revise and then star in it.

The uninterested Doyle gave his permission and Gillette transformed Holmes into more of a melodrama star and less of a stodgy British detective.

Gillette read all of Doyle’s original stories, took four weeks off from his current tour for the popular Secret Service and rewrote the play. That November, a fire in San Francisco’s Baldwin Hotel destroyed all of the scenery and sets of Secret Service; and also the only script of Sherlock Holmes!

It’s Elementary – Gillette asked Doyle if he could marry Holmes for the play. Doyle’s reply via telegram has become famous: “You may marry him, murder him or do anything you like to him.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: An Index (So Far)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: An Index (So Far)

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Index_Holmes
An awesome print by Tom Richmond of Holmes on screen over the years. I own print #7 of 450

Surprisingly, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes has now made it to thirty posts. While I’m sure the dedicated reader types ‘Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ in the search field to call up all the posts in the series, I said to myself (I talk to myself a lot),  “Bob, there’s got to be an easier way for someone to bask in the entirety of your writings so far.”

And there is! Below is an index with links to all the posts, followed by some topics likely to come.

 

Sherlock Holmes/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes – Introduction to the column (rather unoriginal title, eh?)

Lord of Misrule – Christopher Lee as the great detective

The Case of the Short Lived Sherlock – One of my favorite Holmes’, Ian Richardson

Creation to Death and Back – A good intro to Holmes, focusing on Doyle’s love-hate (minus the love) relationship with his most famous creation

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