Clyne Vincent (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. Derleth's first collection of stories focusing on his imitation of Sherlock Holmes, who he names Solar Pons. A 12mo of 7-1/2 inches, not a "small octavo" as sometimes claimed. One of 3,604 copies printed for Mycroft & Moran, Sauk City, Wisconsin, (Derleth's home town) 1945, though several of the stories appeared in pulp detective magazines as early as 1929.) Jacket front flap has been price-clipped. PON "M.L. Finn" stamped to top outside corners of the pastedowns. A few lines of Starrett's introduction are underlined in red ink. (Starrett reports the young Derleth wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, circa 1928, "courteously" asking if the master intended to write any further Holmes stories, and that Sir Arthur "made no promises in his good-natured reply." Is that true, though? Or did Derleth unsucessfully seek permission to continue the Holmes stories himself, just as he was later to expand and alter the work product of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard after those pulp authors' untimely demise, "posthumous collaborations" which Lovecraft biographer S.T.Joshi has branded "disreputable"? The collection includes The Adventures of the Late Mr. Faversham, the Black Narcissus, the Norcross Riddle, the Retired Novelist, the Three Red Dwarfs, seven others. 238 pp. Jacket by Ronald Clyne (illustrator). …