Character Model
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. Watson, the Pons stories are narrated by Dr. Lyndon Parker; in the Pons stories Holmes and Watson share lodgings not at 221B Baker Street but at 7B Praed Street, whereas their landlady is not Mrs. Hudson but Mrs. Johnson. Whereas 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 whereas 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 distinctly different personality, far less melancholy and brooding than Holmes'.
The Pons stories also cross over, at times, with the writings of others, such as Derleth's literary correspondent H. P. Lovecraft in "The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders", Fu Manchu author Sax Rohmer, and Carnacki the Ghost-Finder in "The Adventure of the Haunted Library".
We know that Pons is physically slender and the smokes a pipe filled with 'abominable shag'.
The tales in the Pontine canon (as the collected works are known) can be broadly divided into two classes, the straight and the humorous, the straight being more or less straightforward tales of detection in the classic Holmesian mode, while the others—a minority—have some gentle fun, most notably by involving fictional characters from outside either canon (most notably Dr. Fu Manchu, who recurs); perhaps the most outstanding example is "The Adventure of the Orient Express", in which we encounter, among others, very thinly disguised versions of Ashenden, Hercule Poirot, and The Saint.
Several of the Pontine tales have titles taken from the famous "unrecorded" cases of Holmes which Watson often alluded to, including the matters of "Ricoletti of the Club Foot (and his Abominable Wife)," "The Aluminium Crutch," "The Black Cardinal," and that of "The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant." Others of the canon are riffs on Holmesian tales, such as "The Adventure of the Tottenham Werewolf" paralleling (in some ways) Holmes' case of the Sussex Vampire.
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