AUGUST WILLIAM DERLETH (1909–1971) was born in Sauk City, in Wisconsin, where he remained his entire life, most of which appears to have been spent at the typewriter, as he wrote more than three thousand stories and articles, and published more than a hundred books, including detective stories (featuring Judge Peck and the Sherlock Holmes-like character Solar Pons), supernatural stories, and what he regarded as his serious fiction: a very lengthy series of books, stories, poems, journals, etc., about life in his small town, which he renamed Sac Prairie.
When Derleth learned that Arthur Conan Doyle had no plans to write more Holmes stories, he wrote to ask permission to continue the series; Conan Doyle graciously declined. Nonetheless, Derleth proceeded, inventing a name that was syllabically reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, and wrote his first pastiches about Solar Pons, ultimately producing more stories about Pons than Conan Doyle did about Holmes.
Pons is all but a clone of Holmes. Both have prodigious powers of observation and deduction, able to tell minute details about those they have just met, deduced in seconds of observation. They also are physically similar, both being tall and slender. Holmes stories are narrated by Dr. John H. Watson, Pons stories by Dr. Lyndon Parker, with whom he shares rooms at 7B Praed Street; their landlady is Mrs. Johnson. Holmes’s elder brother, Mycroft, has even greater gifts than Sherlock, and Solar Pons’s brother, Bancroft, is also superior.
Among the few differences between Holmes and Pons are their time frames. The most memorable Holmes adventures took place in the 1880s and 1890s, whereas Pons flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Pons is also a more cheerful figure than Holmes, less given to depression and bouts of drug use.
Several of the Pontine tales have titles taken from the famous unrecorded cases to which Watson often alluded, including “Ricoletti of the Club Foot (and his Abominable Wife),” “The Aluminum Crutch,” “The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant,” and the present story.
“The Adventure of the Remarkable Worm” was first published in Three Problems for Solar Pons (Sauk City, Wisconsin, Mycroft & Moran, 1952).