Mycroft Holmes
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Mycroft Holmes is a fictional character in the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. He is the older brother (by seven years) of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. Possessing deductive powers exceeding even those of his younger brother, Mycroft is nonetheless incapable of performing detective work similar to that of Sherlock since 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.
Mycroft has appeared or been mentioned in at least four stories by Doyle, including "The Greek Interpreter", "The Final Problem", "The Empty House" and "The Bruce-Partington Plans". While he does occasionally exert himself in these stories on the 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 usually portrayed as being much heavier than his brother.
Mycroft spends most of his time at the Diogenes Club, which he co-founded.
A resemblance has been noted between Mycroft Holmes and another brilliant but sedentary fictional detective, Nero Wolfe; it has been suggested, with varying degrees of seriousness, that they may have been related. The best-known form of this hypothesis — popularized 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.
Another 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. In a similar vein, the television show Numb3rs features a mathematician who frequently aids his FBI agent brother.
[edit] References in popular culture
Mycroft Holmes has been portrayed many times in film, television, and radio adaptations of the Holmes stories. In the 1950s radio series starring John Gielgud as Sherlock Holmes, Gielgud's own brother, Val Gielgud, played the part. 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 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 featured in the Mary Russell mystery series by Laurie R. King. In King's novels, Sherlock Holmes is married to Russell, a half-American, half-British Jew who is 39 years younger than himself. Sherlock's older brother Mycroft occasionally assigns Russell and Holmes different cases.
- He is depicted as a violent psychopath in 2000 AD (Canon Fodder, issues 861-867) by Mark Millar.
- He is briefly mentioned in the 1985 film, Young Sherlock Holmes, when Sherlock is expelled from his school.
- 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 and in paperback by Playboy Press in 1980). 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 action takes place ten years after the end of the American Civil War.
- Mycroft and the Diogenes Club play an important part in Kim Newman's novel Anno Dracula.
- In Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mycroft Holmes appears as the leader of British intelligence under the code-name "M" (a reference to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels).
Mycroft is also sometimes referred to less directly in popular culture:
- 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 computer.
- Since Detective Robert Goren (from Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is often compared to Sherlock Holmes, Goren's brother - referred to a few times on the show, but never seen - may be reminiscent of Mycroft.
- 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.
