Once more the most successful of pastiche-detectives, Solar Pons, created by August Derleth, walks on stage with a new sequence of adventures. In this fourth major collection, Solar Pons is engaged with an intriguing variety of problems — the curious puzzle of the antique sovereign boxes narrated in the novelette, “The Adventure of the Mosaic Cylinders“; the sanguine riddle of the body in the thirteenth coffin told in “The Adventure of the Mazarine Blue”; the perplexing matter of the man devoted to British bowlers — “The Adventure of the Hats of M. Dulac“; the incredible plot to foment a religious war — “The Adventure of the Black Cardinal“; the disturbing facts in the murder of a psychic client — “The Adventure of the Blind Clairaudient” — and others.
Solar Pons has won a place for himself among the outstanding exponents of the deductive. Almost two decades ago Vincent Starrett hailed his initial adventures as “the best substitutes for Sherlock Holmes known to this reviewer.” The stories in this book — like their predecessors — are, as Ney MacMinn put it in The Chicago Tribune, much more than imitations — “an excellent series of adventures in detection in their own right.” Here once again is the atmosphere of Baker Street and the London of Sherlock Holmes.
