Mycroft Holmes

For other uses, see Mycroft (disambiguation).

Mycroft Holmes
Sherlock Holmes character
as depicted by Sidney Edward Paget in Strand Magazine
First appearance	The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter
Created by	Arthur Conan Doyle
Information
Gender	Male
Relatives	Sherlock Holmes (brother)
Nationality	English

Mycroft Holmes is a fictional character in the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. He is the elder brother (by seven years) of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes.

Profile

Possessing deductive powers exceeding even those of his younger brother, Mycroft is nevertheless incapable of performing detective work similar to that of Sherlock as he is unwilling to put in the physical effort necessary to bring cases to their conclusions.

...he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points...

—Sherlock Holmes, speaking of his brother in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"

While Conan Doyle's stories leave unclear what Mycroft Holmes' exact position is in the British government, Sherlock Holmes says that "Occasionally he is the British government [...] the most indispensable man in the country." He apparently serves as a sort of human computer:

The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.

—"The Bruce-Partington Plans"

Mycroft has appeared or been mentioned in four stories by Doyle: "The Greek Interpreter", "The Final Problem", "The Empty House" and "The Bruce-Partington Plans". While he does occasionally exert himself in these stories on behalf of his brother, he on the whole remains a sedentary problem-solver, providing solutions based on seemingly no evidence and trusting Sherlock to handle any of the practical details. In fact, Mycroft's own lack of practicality is a severe handicap despite his deductive talents: in "The Greek Interpreter", his blundering approach to the case nearly costs the client his life.

Mycroft resembles Sherlock, but is described in "The Greek Interpreter" as being "a much larger and stouter man". In "The Bruce-Partington Plans", the following description is given:

Heavily built and massive, there was a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure, but above this unwieldy frame there was perched a head so masterful in its brow, so alert in its steel-gray, deep-set eyes, so firm in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind.

Mycroft spends most of his time at the Diogenes Club, which he co-founded.

In other media

Mycroft Holmes has been portrayed many times in film, television, and radio adaptations of the Holmes stories.

Radio

• In the 1950s radio series starring John Gielgud as Sherlock Holmes, Gielgud's own brother, Val Gielgud, played the part.
• John Hartley played Mycroft in "The Greek Interpreter" on October 21, 1992, "The Bruce-Partington Plans" on January 24, 1994 and "The Retired Colourman" on March 29, 1995 in the BBC Radio broadcasts starring Clive Merrison as Sherlock and Michael Williams as Watson.

Film and television

• The first film appearance of Mycroft Holmes was in the 1922 film The Bruce Partington Plans, where he was played by Lewis Gilbert.
• The BBC broadcast a Sherlock Holmes series from 1965 to 1968 which starred Peter Cushing as Sherlock and Nigel Stock as Watson. Mycroft appeared twice, once in 1965 in The Bruce-Partington Plans and played by Derek Francis and in 1968 in The Greek Interpreter and played by Ronald Adam.
• In the 1965 film A Study in Terror, Mycroft is played by Robert Morley.
• In the Billy Wilder-directed film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), which starred Robert Stephens as Sherlock, Mycroft was played by Christopher Lee (who also played Sherlock Holmes in other productions before and since). In this film, which purports to show the 'real' people behind Watson's dramatised accounts, Mycroft is nearly unrecognisable: whippet-thin and not notably indolent. He is also depicted as either the head or at least a senior operative of the British secret service, for which the Diogenes Club is a front.
• Charles Gray assumed the character in both the 1976 film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and four episodes of Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
• The 1975 film The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, starring Gene Wilder as Holmes' younger brother "Sigerson Holmes," was inspired by Mycroft (he is mentioned, but doesn't appear).
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, a series of television films made by Soviet television, featured Boris Klyuyev as Mycroft Holmes, despite Klyuyev being nine years younger than Vasily Livanov, who played Sherlock Holmes.
• He is also briefly mentioned in the 1985 film, Young Sherlock Holmes; when Sherlock is expelled from boarding school, he tells Watson that he plans to stay at his brother Mycroft's for a few days.
• Peter Jeffrey played Mycroft in the 1990 film Hands of a Murderer which starred Edward Woodward as Sherlock, John Hillerman as Watson and Anthony Andrews as Professor Moriarty.
• Jerome Willis played Mycroft in Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, a 1992 made-for-TV film which starred Christopher Lee as Holmes and Patrick Macnee as Watson.
• R. H. Thomson played Mycroft in the 2001 made-for-TV film The Royal Scandal opposite Matt Frewer's Sherlock.
• Richard E. Grant played him as a semi-crippled young man- following a bad trip after he was injected with drugs by Moriarty- in Sherlock: Case of Evil (2002).
• Mark Gatiss played Mycroft in the 2010 BBC television series Sherlock. In this modernized version, Sherlock exhibits smouldering animosity towards his brother which Dr. Watson characterizes as "sibling rivalry." Mycroft, who Sherlock says can be affiliated with either MI6 or the CIA "on a freelance basis", calls this a "childish feud."
• Stephen Fry will portray Mycroft in the upcoming Guy Ritchie-directed Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, scheduled for release in December 2011.^[1]

Novels and short stories

The character has been used many times in works that are not adaptations of Holmes stories:

• In Jasper Fforde's series of books about Thursday Next, Mycroft is revealed to be Thursday's uncle, having escaped into fiction and taken up residence in the Sherlock Holmes series to escape the evil Goliath Corporation.
• He was the main character in a series of mystery novels by the author Quinn Fawcett.
• He is a recurring character in the Mary Russell mystery series by Laurie R. King, which feature a retired Sherlock Holmes as a major character. Mycroft is portrayed as a senior figure in the British Secret Service, who occasionally calls on Russell and Holmes for assistance in specific cases.
• A young Mycroft Holmes is the protagonist of a mystery-adventure "edited" by Michael P. Hodel and Sean M. Wright, Enter the Lion: A Posthumous Memoir of Mycroft Holmes (published in hardcover by Hawthorn Books in 1979 in the U.S. and by JM Dent & Sons Ltd. in 1980 in London (ISBN 0-460-04483-4) and in paperback by Playboy Press in 1980). The action takes place in 1875, ten years after the end of the American Civil War, at the time when Mycroft Holmes was a minor official in the Foreign Office. Mycroft is aided by his younger brother Sherlock, Victor Trevor (who appears in Doyle's tale "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott"), and an adventurer known as "Captain Jericho", a mysterious former slave. They band together in an effort to prevent an attempt by former Confederate officers to involve the British government in a scheme to overthrow the United States government. The story also provides an explanation as to the antagonism between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty.
• Mycroft has a small but extremely important role in Ray Walsh's novel The Mycroft Memoranda, published in London by Andre Deutsch, 1984 (ISBN 0-233-97582-9), in which Sherlock Holmes, at the request of Major Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner for the City of London, becomes involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper.
• Mycroft and the Diogenes Club play an important part in Kim Newman's novel Anno Dracula.
• The Doctor Who novel All-Consuming Fire featured Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, as well as the apocryphal Sherringford Holmes. The Doctor's companion Bernice Summerfield was then reunited with Mycroft in the 2008 audio play The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel where he was voiced by David Warner.
• The novel Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth suggests that Oscar Wilde's friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle led Doyle to create Mycroft as a caricature of Wilde: mentally brilliant, but indolent and lazy.
• The award-winning short story by Robert J. Sawyer, "You See But You Do Not Observe", portrays Mycroft Holmes' namesake involved in pulling Sherlock and Watson into the year 2096 to solve a scientific mystery.
• He appears in the novel The Italian Secretary (2005) by Caleb Carr.
• In the Enola Holmes series, Mycroft is the official legal guardian of their much younger sister, Enola, after the mysterious departure of their mother on her daughter's 14th birthday. Rather than submit to his wish for her to be sent to boarding school to conform to contemporary feminine social mores, Enola instead runs away to secretly become a private detective in London while eluding her brothers. Through the series, Mycroft is steadfastly determined to capture her while Sherlock gradually grows to respect her considerable talents and begins to understand her reasons for her defiance. However, it is Mycroft who suspects that Enola may well be determined to become an adult colleague in his brother's profession, a notion Sherlock finds difficult to accept.
• The Young Sherlock Holmes series by Andrew Lane features Mycroft Holmes.

Comics

• He is depicted as a violent psychopath in 2000 AD (Canon Fodder, issues #861–867) by Mark Millar and Chris Weston.
• In Issue #6, Volume 1 of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mycroft Holmes becomes the leader of British intelligence and uses the code-name "M" – a nod to the fictional head of MI6 in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. It is hinted that he and his brother are not on the best of terms as a mention of Sherlock sending his regards are met by Mycroft with laughter and regarded as a joke. (Mycroft also appears as the Bond M in Son of Holmes and Anno Dracula).
• Mycroft Holmes is the head of "The Committee" in the comic book mini-series, Predator: Nemesis, by Gordon Rennie and Colin MacNeil and published by Dark Horse Comics. He hires the main character, Captain Edward Soames, to hunt down the murderer "Spring-Heeled Jack", a Predator hunting in the East End.
• Mycroft Holmes appears at least twice in the Italian comic book Martin Mystère and spin-off series Storie di Altrove/Stories from Elsewhere.^[2][3]

PC games

• He plays a central role as the victim of an assassination attempt in the PC game The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The case of the Rose Tattoo.
• In the 2009 PC game Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper, the younger Holmes receives assistance on a case from his brother.

References in popular culture

Mycroft is also sometimes referred to less directly in popular culture:

• A parallel can be observed in the TV series Monk in the connection between fictional obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk and his even more intelligent, though even more neurotic and agoraphobic, brother Ambrose. Like Mycroft, Ambrose is more intelligent than his brother but is less willing to investigate (though this is because he is agoraphobic).
• Mycroft was parodied in the Solar Pons series with a character named Bancroft Stoneham Pons, who was also seven years older than the leading protagonist.
• Mycroft Holmes was the inspiration for the name of the silent assistant quiz master of BBC Radio 4's programme Brain of Britain. The phrase "Mycroft is shaking his head" became well known to listeners. Ian Gillies (who was known as Mycroft) died in 2002 and was replaced by a character known as "Jorkins".
• Mycroft was the inspiration for the name of a character in Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: "Mycroft" a.k.a. Mike, a H.O.L.M.E.S. ("High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor") Mark 4, a sentient computer. At one point in the story, Mike indicates Sherlock is indeed his brother.
• A series of comics stories by Kim Deitch feature "Miles Mycroft, psychic detective".
• The character of the Marquis of London in Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, while mostly based on Nero Wolfe, also has elements of Mycroft, in that he is a government official related to the detective and, while just as intelligent as his relative, has little interest in using his intellect to solve crimes.
• First series of seaQuest DSV, in the episode "Photon Bullet", a reformed computer hacker used the handle "Mycroft" while at a underwater telecommunications node.
• British writer Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse series of books, wrote a Sherlock Holmes short story "A Case of Mis-Identity", part of a collection of short stories published under the title "Morse's Greatest Mystery", in which Watson's practical knowledge of the circumstances of a case outwits the armchair intellectual logic of both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes.
• Agatha Christie in The Big Four introduced "Achille Poirot, the brother of Hercule Poirot". This is considered a deliberate parody of Mycroft Holmes. (In one passage, Hercule Poirot actually says: "Don't you know that every detective has a brother who is smarter but less practical than himself?") Later in the book, Christie gives the impression that in fact "Achille" was Poirot himself in disguise.
• In John Dickson Carr's "Sir Henry Merrivale" novels, the brilliant, overweight Military Intelligence chief is compared to Mycroft Holmes, much to his annoyance.
• A resemblance has been noted between Mycroft Holmes and another brilliant but sedentary fictional detective, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe; it has been suggested, with varying degrees of seriousness, that they may have been related. (Note, however, that there no evidence that Stout himself intended this to be the case.) The best-known form of this hypothesis — popularised by William S. Baring-Gould, who wrote "biographies" of both Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe — holds that Wolfe is the offspring of Sherlock and Irene Adler.
• At one point it was planned for Gregory House to have an elder brother who was based on Mycroft, in much the same way that House is based on Sherlock. Stephen Fry (who is the comedic partner of House's actor, Hugh Laurie) was to play him, but was unable to due to other commitments, and the plan was scrapped. Fry has now been confirmed for the role of Mycroft in the sequel to the 2009 Sherlock Holmes film.
• In the TV series Numb3rs episode Angels and Devils, Larry Fleinhardt, played by Peter MacNicol, says: "I have rather always fancied myself more as a Mycroft than a Dr. Watson." He expands upon this reference in the series finale when he assumes the role of math/science expert for the FBI in place of Charlie Eppes saying, "...like Sherlock's brother Mycroft Holmes, I prefer to do the conceptualizing, leaving the grunt work to others."
• In Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga series, Embalming, Asuhit Richter's client in London sends his younger brother, whom he describes at 'Good at this kind of thing', to locate Dr. Peabody and Fury Flatliner, who had just arrived in the city. Though neither is introduced by name, the younger brother's silhouette bears startling resemblance to Sherlock Holmes, implying Asuhit's client is Mycroft Holmes, an implication that is supported by his position as a high-standing government official.

References

1. ^ "Stephen Fry to play Sherlock Holmes' brother on film". BBC. September 27, 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11417860. Retrieved 2010-09-27. 
2. ^ Martin Mystère: The Return of Jack
3. ^ Stories from Elsewhere: The creature from the fog

External links

• Sherlock Holmes Public Library
• Mycroft Holmes at the Internet Movie Database