HEN I FIRST HEARD THE NAME OF SOLAR PONS, some ten years ago, at first I mentally grouped him with the other (often badly written) parodies like Hemlock Sholmes. A huge disservice, I realised soon thereafter, for Solar Pons is one of the few pastiche series that can actually come close to those of ACD’s original creations. In fact, this detective has quite a few fans of his own, the most enthusiastic of which is undoubtedly Bob Byrne, whose true labour of love, the website SolarPons.com, along with his sumptuously written and illustrated Solar Pons Gazette, is a veritable monument to August Derleth’s creation.

I’ve asked Bob to write a short introduction to Solar Pons for us, and he has graced us with the following….

Solar Pons?

Who is that? The Sherlock Holmes reader is painfully aware of how many stories featuring the world’s first consulting detective are available. While many are of admirable quality, many, many more are not. But one suspects that the Master himself would flash that wry
smile in acknowledging that the finest pastiches feature a detective not named Holmes! Young August Derleth, disappointed to learn that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would not be writing any additional Holmes tales, took it upon himself to continue the tradition of the great detective. Thus was created Solar Pons, ‘The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street.’

Solar Pons and his trustworthy companion, Doctor Parker, reside at 7B Praed Street, taken care of by their long-suffering landlady, Mrs. Johnson. Of the multitude to follow in the footsteps of Sir Arthur, none as faithfully evoke the images of the dynamic duo from Baker Street. The spirit of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson lives on in the tales of August Derleth.

www.SolarPons.com is the first website dedicated solely to the adventures of Solar Pons. The Holmes fan that has not yet discovered these stories is likely in for a treat.

If you haven’t yet seen it, count on spending an entertaining hour or so browsing through his lavish Solar Pons Gazette, of which I’m told there is a short Christmas issue forthcoming, to be followed by another large edition next year.

HE TRADES has a review of Mack and Citrin’s new Sherlockian juvenile book entitled Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas:

In the spirit of the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series comes this new addition to the Sherlock Holmes legend from husband and wife team Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin. Told with a focus on the rag-tag gang of boys that got short shrift in the Doyle stories, the Baker Street Irregulars, the story is still a Holmes adventure, as seen from behind the scenes.

LOVE CANDID INTERVIEWS with writers, and especially with those who expose both personality and writing process without shielding themselves by a thin veneer of propriety or pomp. The Sacramento Bee has a fascinating interview with Sherlockian author and bad boy Michael Kurland, the author of the recent Moriarty series and the editor of a series of pastiche anthologies.

From Elementary, My Dear Kurland:

“I didn’t want to write a pastiche,” Kurland says. “I don’t like doing what somebody else has done. If I write a Holmes story and let Dr. Watson tell it, I can’t win. I’m going to be compared to Doyle and I’ll lose. Why would I do that? A lot of people do just that because the books sell. But if you write a Watson story and add anything to it, 10,000 Sherlockians are going to hate you.” […]

“Holmes is a bit of a prig,” Kurland points out. “He’ll occasionally break the law, but he won’t break the social bond, no matter how stupid it is. In Doyle’s day, Holmes was the perfect Victorian. Not as we think of Victorians today, as lacy and uptight. But the way Victorians thought of themselves, as modern, scientific and logical.

“Moriarty thinks all that is bull. Basically, Moriarty is a late-20th-century man living in the late 19th century.”

(From what I can tell, the Sacramento Bee website allows you to read this article without registration the first time, but if you revisit the site, you have to undergo a free registration to see it again.)

T ISN’T UNUSUAL to find our favourite detective used to illuminate some modern mystery, and especially those political ones mused by pundit journalists. A case in point — the Palm Beach Post of July 31st has a dialogue between Holmes and Watson in which they discuss Valerie Plame: Watson, the Plame game is afoot.

“You know, Holmes,” I said, “there is still something about the Valerie Plame matter that mystifies me.”

“No doubt,” the great man replied. There may have been a note of condescension in his response, but it was a relief from his infernal violin scraping. It was partially to stop the violin that I had spoken up. As we talked, however, I realized our thoughts were headed for the case book. Call it the Singular Case of the Missing Victims.

For those of you not in North America, or who don’t care enough to follow American political scandals (they do tend to bore me), Plame was a CIA agent “outed” by a high profile politician in the Bush entourage after her husband wrote an article criticising the U.S. invasion of Iraq. More details can be found in the Wikipedia entry for Valerie Plame.

HILE Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell stories (beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice) are practically required reading for pastiche enthusiasts, I must confess that I haven’t ready any of her other popular mystery series involving the San Francisco detective Kate Martinelli. That said, her new book, The Art of Detection, looks like it may be the perfect introduction to the series for myopic Sherlockians like myself. The Miami Herald covers her latest offering in their online article Summer reading: Kick back with a book from our list:

Mary, who signs on as Holmes’ apprentice and ends up as his wife, doesn’t make an appearance here, but her husband solves the case in an unpublished story rumored to have been the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The manuscript falls into Kate’s hands during the investigation of a memorabilia collector’s murder and leads her into the arcane, fascinating world of Sherlockians, whose contradictory hobbies include dinner parties in full Victorian costume as well as webcam broadcasts. As Kate investigates, the great detective applies his powers of deduction in the manuscript, which is contained within the novel.

Read the rest (the book is about two-thirds down the page).

Hmmm. Anybody got a link to Sherlockian webcam broadcasts…?

SAD day for some baby boomers, and perhaps even a few Holmes fans: USATODAY.com - ‘Space Cadet’ star Frankie Thomas dies.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Frankie Thomas, who became famous in the 1950s for his starring role in the TV children’s show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, has died. He was 85. […]

Thomas quit acting when the series ended in 1955 and, over the years, worked as a television and radio writer, bridge instructor and author of mystery novels, including Sherlock Holmes and the Masquerade Murders.

Read the rest. Thanks to R.H. Riethmeier for the link.

I’m afraid I’m quite unfamiliar with Thomas’ novel Sherlock Holmes and the Masquerade Murders (from The Armchair Detective Library). Can anybody here offer any feedback on it?

ETWEEN 1997 and 2001, at the height of the dot-com bubble, the Sci-Fi channel decided to invest some money into producing a number of original audio stories under the banner of Seeing Ear Theatre, essentially a “next generation” of radio plays for a modern audience. A talented team of script-writers, actors and sound effects people crafted a series of remarkable episodes, breathing life into the stories of both classic writers, like Harlan Ellison and Frederic Brown, and modern writers, like Neil Gaiman and J. Michael Straczynski. Readers of this site may find particular interest in an adaption of Poul Anderson’s classic science fiction Sherlockian pastiche called The Martian Crown Jewels.

The Martian Crown Jewels have been stolen! The theft threatens to destroy diplomatic relations between Mars and Earth. Inspector Gregg, of the Earth police force stationed on Mars is stumped! Who can solve the baffling mystery and avert a galactic catastrophe of cataclysmic proportions? None other than Mars’ greatest private investigator, Syaloch, a seven-foot stork who lives in the “Street of Those who Prepare Nourishment in Ovens.” He is a brilliant thinker who (despite being a 7 foot tall bird) is the very image of another “great detective” from Earth’s past. Can Syaloch, after all his reading of Earth’s Sherlock Holmes, crack the case in this delightful playfair mystery? Elementary!

Unfortunately, the Seeing Ear Theatre project is no more, but you can still listen to the delightful The Martian Crown Jewels in its archives, at least for now. (Note: RealPlayer is needed, which is a free download for the basic version.)

OT content to let the adventures of Sherlock Holmes rest at a mere sixty stories, thousands of authors have determined to place the Great Detective in every country of the world, meeting every possible person who’s lived from 1860 to 2300, and seeking mystery of every possible concoction, from plausable to positively ridiculous. It seems like an impossible task to keep track of them all.

But that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t tried.

The other day, I found myself wondering in which pastiche I read of Holmes’ encounter with Oscar Wilde. A standard old Google search proved fruitless. And then I remembered the site called Sherlock Holmes Pastiche Characters (at www.SchoolAndHolmes.com). A work of great effort and obvious devotion,

The site is essentially a listing of historical, fictional and canonical characters appearing, or mentioned in published Sherlock Holmes pastiches, parodies and other Sherlockian writings.

The site owner has thoroughly catalogued some 1200 works, providing everything from plot summaries to exceedingly detailed character appearances, and has even gone so far as to include book covers and a pastiche writer’s dictionary (with “translations” of Americanisms). This is truly an amazing labour of love and dedication.

As for Mr. Wilde, I was absolutely astounded by the number of his appearances in various pastiches. (By the way, it was Nicholas Meyer’s The West End Horror: A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D. that I was trying to remember.)

FROM Shelly Shepherd Klaner at the Santa Rosa (California) newspaper The Press Democrat comes an interesting look at two of the current kings of Sherlockian pastiche, Two mystery scribes at home with Holmes - Despite their differences, writers say it’s elementary, dear reader - they were destined to meet:

Arthur Conan Doyle himself couldn’t have foreseen the serendipitous meeting of two Petaluma mystery writers, both of whom use Sherlock Holmes in their new novels.

Michael Kurland and Steve Hockensmith are 30 years apart in age and seemingly as different as Felix and Oscar from “The Odd Couple.”

Kurland sports a list of published books on a canon several pages long; Hockensmith is excited about the release of his first novel.

Kurland used to be a stand-up comic; Hockensmith made his living as an entertainment reporter and even spent a year as the editor of X-Files magazine.

Along the way, Hockensmith, 37, interviewed Kurland, 67, for an article about the longevity of Sherlock Holmes.

The new novels in question are, of course, Michael Kurland’s The Empress of India : A Professor Moriarty Novel and Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range.

rom the February 22, 2006 edition of the Petaluma Argus Courier is a dandy little article called Two Holmesians, no Watson, concerning a book signing with two of the current kings of Sherlockian pastiche, Steve Hockensmith and Michael Kurland:

Poor Watson. He won’t be getting his royalty check this month. That’s because two Petaluma authors, Michael Kurland and Steve Hockensmith, have published Sherlock Holmes-inspired mysteries that are not narrated by Dr. John Watson, and, in fact, don’t include much of Holmes either. […]

For Hockensmith, “Holmes on the Range” is his first Holmes-inspired mystery, and in fact his first published book. It’s set during the Holmes era, 1893, but in the Old West. In it, two cowboy brothers find work on a ranch during hard times. They have heard of Sherlock Holmes from stories in Harper’s Weekly, and the eldest brother, “Old Red,” has become a big fan of Holmes. Fortunately, people on the ranch keep turning up dead, so there’s a big mystery to be solved.

For Kurland, “The Empress of India” is his fourth Sherlock Holmes mystery that focuses on Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty. In the series, Moriarty is represented as somewhat misunderstood. Certainly he is still a criminal, but most of his dalliances are staged to raise money to fund his worthy scientific endeavors, such as astronomy.

hose new to the world of Sherlock Holmes often get confused by the term “pastiche”. According to the Oxford, a pastiche is an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist or period. A pastiche, in our case, refers to a (semi-)serious tale that respects the Holmes of the Canon. Therefore, Watson is usually the story-teller, the time is usually the latter part of the nineteeth century or the beginning of the twentieth, and Holmes is an observant and deductive reasoner who dedicates himself to the cause of good. Rules are made to be broken, of course, and pastiches have placed him in today’s world, the far-flung future, the dawn of man, and so on. He may face dinosaurs, travel to the north pole, be psychoanalysed by Sigmund Freud, battle Jesse James, meet [insert notorious modern killer here], go toe-to-toe with Dracula or Frankenstein, save Abraham Lincoln, defeat any of a hundred different Jack the Rippers, and so on. And don’t get me started on the various Watsons, which can range from female lovers to robots. I’ve heard tell the estimate of some 16,000 pastiches written to date.

Note that a pastiche differs from a parody, which is meant to be humourous. Sometimes the line is a blurred one. The notion of a mighty-hewed Holmes alongside a Watson android, facing down a tyrannosaurus rex in order to save an imperiled Princess Adler… well, it can stimulate the giggles, even if it wasn’t intended by the author.

Ah, to the point of this post…. The BBC Cult site for Sherlock Holmes has a series of five original pastiches: The Spy’s Retirement by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Lady Downstairs by Christopher Fowler, The Lost World by Dominic Green, A Shambles in Belgravia by Kim Newman, and The Deer Stalker by Paul Cornell. These stories can be read online or downloaded to your PDA (which is what I did). Also in the site may be found a gallery of the original illustrations created for these stories –which were apparently broadcast as readings on BBC7– and an interview with the always-fascinating Bert Coules, the writer of the new Sherlock Holmes BBC radio plays (now scheduled for a third series).

These stories range from quite good to rather mediocre, but all of them certainly have their merits. Note that the BBC Cult sites are no longer being maintained, so don’t be surprised if any of this material suddenly disappears.