Mycroft Holmes

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Mycroft Holmes as depicted by Sidney Edward Paget in Strand Magazine
Mycroft Holmes
as depicted by Sidney Edward Paget in Strand Magazine

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.

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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.

– "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 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 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.

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.

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.

[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. 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 dramatized accounts, Mycroft is nearly unrecognizable: whippet-thin, not notably indolent, and (judging by several serious misjudgements in the course of events) not the mental powerhouse Watson describes him as. 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:

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.
  • 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.

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