Months afterwards a curious newspaper cutting reached us from Buda-Pesth.27 It told how two Englishmen who had been travelling with a woman had met with a tragic end. They had each been stabbed, it seems, and the Hungarian police were of opinion that they had quarrelled and had inflicted mortal injuries upon each other. Holmes, however, is, I fancy, of a different way of thinking, and he holds to this day that, if one could find the Grecian girl, one might learn how the wrongs of herself and her brother came to be avenged.
MYCROFT HOLMES
MYCROFT HOLMES is mentioned in only three stories in the Canon, “The Greek Interpreter,” “The Empty House,” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” and little is known of his life. Yet the tantalising glimpses provided in these tales leads to wild speculation on Mycroft. “He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living,” says Sherlock of his older brother in the latter story. “All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.”
Several scholars take this description to an extreme, concluding that Mycroft was either an anthropomorphic computer himself, the first operator of a government computer, or an acronym for a “Babbage engine” developed for the government. In Robert A. Heinlein’s great science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the government computer that oversees the lunar base is named Mycroft.
More reasonably, J. S. Callaway suggests that Mycroft Holmes was the head of the Secret Intelligence Service of the British government, whose identity was carefully concealed by the government. Billy Wilder’s film Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) makes the same identification (with Christopher Lee, who played Sherlock in the German film The Deadly Necklace (1962), in the part of Mycroft), and Ian Fleming’s reference to James Bond’s superior as “M” may reflect a hereditary title applied to Mycroft’s successors. In Alan Moore’s masterly graphic novel League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, now a film featuring Richard Roxburgh (who recently played Sherlock in the BBC’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (2003) in the rôle, Mycroft (“M”) is the head of the British intelligence agency; and the Diogenes Club itself is characterised as the top security council in Kim Newman’s fine novel Anno Dracula (1992).
A few writers suggest that Mycroft was not in fact Sherlock’s brother at all but in reality, another historic figure. One plumps for Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, another for Oscar Wilde. Two others propose that Mycroft was indeed Sherlock’s brother but that Sherlock’s assessment of him in “The Greek Interpreter,” as “absolutely incapable” of conducting the activities which Sherlock regularly undertakes in the course of a case, is completely wrong—in fact, they assert, Mycroft actually conducted a practice as a consulting detective under the alias of “Martin Hewitt,” whose adventures were reported in the Strand Magazine by Arthur Morrison. Although Hewitt is described as stout, the Hewitt adventures were illustrated in the Strand Magazine by Sidney Paget, and it seems unlikely that Paget would mistakenly have drawn two different people if “Martin Hewitt” and “Mycroft Holmes” were one and the same person.
1“The Greek Interpreter” was first published in the September 1893 edition of the Strand Magazine and in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on September 16, 1893. Therefore Watson’s “long and intimate acquaintance,” mentioned in the first sentence, probably lasted less than twelve years.
2Was Holmes a golfer? Webster Evans notes that in “Wisteria Lodge,” Watson records the fact that Holmes “spent his days in long and often solitary walks” in the country. “Holmes murmured some excuse about it being very pleasant to see ‘the first green shoots upon the hedges and the catkins on the hazels.’ But that word green—I wonder if he was really only walking.” Evans, as well as Bob Jones in Sherlock Holmes, The Golfer and Sherlock Holmes Saved Golf, concludes that Holmes was an avid golfer. If so, his game was surely influenced by Sir Walter Simpson’s classic instructional manual The Art of Golf, published in 1887 and the first book to include photographs of golfers in mid-swing. Holmes, whose passion for the science of detection led him to stick a harpoon into a pig carcass to gauge the effect (“Black Peter”), would have sympathised with Simpson’s rhapsodic view that “Golf refuses to be preserved like dead meat in tins. It is living, human, and free, ready to fly away at the least sign of an attempt to catch and cage it.”
3The ecliptic consists of the immense circle at which the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the sun meets the celestial sphere (the infinite, imaginary sphere that has Earth at its centre). Because of the Earth’s orbital motion, the sun is said to “follow” the path of the ecliptic through the stars of the firmament every year. The inclusion of this topic in the “conversation”—assuming Holmes participated—makes nonsense of Watson’s claim (in A Study in Scarlet) that Holmes’s knowledge of astronomy was “nil.”
4Atavism refers to the recurrence of an ancestral characteristic, particularly after a long period of its absence. It was also a criminological term encouraged by Italian criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), who held that individuals engaging in criminal acts did so not by choice but because they were “atavistic” and had never evolved past the uncivilized nature of our primitive forebears.
The ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica refers to such individuals as men “who live in the midst of our civilization as mere savages. . . . [T]he existing system of law can scarcely be brought to distinguish them from criminals. Moralists attribute to atavism a large number of offences which lawyers attribute to guilty dispositions.” But the Britannica editor appears skeptical of this view: “It is not, however, owing to atavism, but to the mere continuance of an old order of things, that so many of our ill-educated classes, shepherds, agricultural labourers, and even factory hands, are as little developed, and live a life as little intellectual as savages. Latent in our small hamlets and large cities there is more savagery than many reformers are aware of, and it needs but little experience to discover something of the old barbarity lurking still in minds and hearts under a thin veil of civilisation.”
In his L’uomo delinquente (1876, partially translated in 1911 as The Criminal Man), Lombroso pointed to certain physical and mental abnormalities of these “born criminals,” such as skull size and assymetries of the face and other parts of the body. His views have since been discredited, but Lombroso’s role in bringing science to the study of criminal behaviour is regarded as pivotal.
Presumably, Holmes (whose knowledge of Italian is evident from “The Red Circle” and his reading of the Italian poet Petrarch mentioned in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”) had some familiarity with Lombroso’s work, for he expresses similar views about genetic “throwbacks” in “The Final Problem,” when he expresses that Professor Moriarty had “hereditary tendencies of a most diabolical kind” and that a criminal strain “ran in his blood.” Here, however, Holmes’s conversation with Watson may have begun on the topic of atavism but quickly segued to the more general topic of inherited traits.
5Tellingly, Holmes does not mention his parents, notes Michael Harrison in his In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes; and he goes on to wonder whether Holmes and his brother may have been orphans brought up in separate households, “possibly by dutiful but somewhat unaffectionate relatives—possibly not.” June Thomson similarly believes that Holmes had an unhappy childhood. She concludes that Mycroft must have experienced this situation as well, observing that both brothers were bachelors without friends and decidedly unsociable.
6Three generations of eminent French painters bore this name. Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) was a painter of landscapes and the renowned “Ports of France” series commissioned by Louis XV; his son, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet (1758–1835), known as Carle, was famed for his paintings of horses and battle scenes, including The Battle of Marengo and Morning of Austerlitz, as well as hunting scenes and lithographs. Carle’s son Émile Jean Horace Vernet (1789–1863), one of the most able military painters of France—whose paintings decorate th
e Battle Gallery at Versailles—is most likely to have been the relative in question.
7Ronald A. Knox, regarded as the father of Sherlockian criticism, ponders, in “The Mystery of Mycroft,” why Holmes has not previously mentioned his brother, when Holmes admits here that he communicated with Mycroft regularly. “[I]t is incredible that Holmes should have made no mention of a surviving member of his family, and one who lived so close, if there had been no reason behind his silence.” Knox contends that Mycroft was in league with Professor Moriarty, whom Holmes combats in “The Final Problem,” and his arguments are considered in detail in the notes below.
8Although Watson uses the word “queer” in many nonsexual contexts throughout the Canon, according to Graham Robb in his Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, the word “queer” had taken on its implications of homosexuality by 1894, when the Marquess of Queensberry—father of Oscar Wilde’s erstwhile lover—referred to Foreign Minister (later Prime Minister) Lord Rosebery, widely suspected of being involved with Queensberry’s older son, as a “Snob Queer.” Robb, in fact, slyly compares Holmes to Wilde as “the other leading wit and aesthete of the Decadent Nineties,” noting the detective’s love of “introspective” German music, his penchant for cleanliness, and his proud declaration that having “art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.” Remember also that Watson refers earlier to Holmes’s “aversion to women.” The sexuality of Sherlock Holmes is oft debated by scholars, whose views range from traditional (Holmes loved Irene Adler) to outlandish (Holmes was a woman). The voyeur-reader is referred to Larry Townsend’s The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1971) for a novel-length treatment of the possibility of Sherlock’s (and Mycroft’s and Watson’s!) sexual preference for other men.
9Possibly Oxford Circus, possibly Piccadilly Circus. Baedeker refers to “Regent Circus, Piccadilly, . . . known as Piccadilly Circus, . . . and Regent Circus, Oxford Street, or simply Oxford Circus.”
10In “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” Watson similarly describes Mycroft’s employer as “some small office under the British Government.” But this is far from the whole truth; only in “The Bruce-Partington Plans” does Holmes reveal to Watson that Mycroft’s position is so important that: “occasionally he is the British Government.” Why does Sherlock Holmes, in this first mention of his brother, not tell Watson the reality of his situation? Ronald Knox dismisses Holmes’s lame explanation, given in “The Bruce-Partingon Plans” (“I did not know you quite so well in those days,” he rationalises), and charges, “Can we really believe that Holmes felt, so late in their acquaintance, any difficulty in reading his friend’s character?” Guessing that only the utmost discretion could have caused Holmes to keep his friend in the dark, Knox concludes, “he told Watson as little as possible about Mycroft . . . because there was a secret in Mycroft’s life which must at all costs be hushed up.”
11Whitehall is a street in Westminster, “round the corner” and just to the south of Pall Mall. By extension, the name refers also to Whitehall’s surrounding streets and squares, dominated as they are by government buildings. (Indeed, “Whitehall” can also be taken to mean the British government itself.) Holmes’s casual description of Mycroft’s commute is a bit problematic, however, for the Exchequer and Audit Office, where one would assume Mycroft worked, was located at Somerset House on the Strand—which Mycroft would reach not by turning the corner southward to Whitehall but rather by continuing eastward several blocks on Pall Mall, bypassing Whitehall altogether. Holmes’s “Whitehall” and “round the corner” may be figurative, then, for it is but a short distance from Pall Mall to Somerset House. Furthermore, an auditor of “several government departments” would likely spend his time “in the field” in Whitehall, rather than at a “home” office on the Strand.
12Baedeker lists twelve clubs with Pall Mall addresses in 1896; Whitaker’s Almanack of 1889 lists fourteen. Whittling them down to surmise which the Diogenes Club might have been requires a simple process of elimination. It seems unlikely that a civil servant would join a political club, such as the Conservative clubs the Carlton, Junior Carlton, or National Conservative; the Liberal-minded Reform Club, or the Unionist-minded Unionist; and it does not appear that Mycroft had any military service qualifying him for any of the five military clubs on the street. The Travellers’ Club limited its members to those who travelled at least 500 miles from London. This leaves only the Athenaeum, the New Athenaeum, the Marlborough, the Oxford and Cambridge University, and the Royal Water Colour Club.
The Royal Water Colour Club was devoted to “art conversazioni, & c.,” according to Whitaker, and may be discarded. As for the Oxford and Cambridge University club, there is no reason to believe that Mycroft attended either Oxford or Cambridge, and it is unthinkable that their graduates could be regarded as “the most unsociable and unclubable men.” The distinguished reputation of Athenaeum, remarks the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.), meant that being admitted to the club was an arduous process, “both tedious as regards the length of time a candidate has to wait before being put up for ballot, and difficult when he is subjected to that crucial test.” The Athenaeum Club therefore seems an unlikely venue for Mycroft Holmes, a mere government employee, who was at this time only forty-one (see Chronological Table) and who apparently had been a member of his club for some time.
This leaves only the Marlborough and the New Athenaeum as likely candidates. The New Athenaeum is listed at Pall Mall W. (no number) and the Marlborough at No. 52, Pall Mall (the Carlton being at No. 94, to the east). Watson soon recounts that he and Holmes turned onto Pall Mall “from the St. James’s end” and ended up “some little distance from the Carlton.” Such a path would have actually put Holmes and Watson to the west of the Carlton; the New Athenaeum and the Travellers’, on the other hand, were east of the Carlton and unlikely to be described as “some little distance from the Carlton,” but rather “past the Carlton.” Indeed, the Travellers’ was two doors east of the Carlton, and the New Athenaeum three. The Diogenes Club cannot be identified, then, on the basis of Watson’s description of their walk (which, it may be said, he had no reason to recall with any special accuracy).
Of course, Holmes’s remark that the club is “just opposite [Mycroft’s] rooms” may not be a literal description of its location, and its address may be on a neighbouring street, where numerous other clubs were located.
In a tour de force entitled “Sherlock Holmes—Was He a ‘Playboy’?,” John C. Hogan demonstrates (perhaps not surprisingly, in the Playboy Club’s member magazine V.I.P.) that Mycroft was a co-founder of the Playboy Club of London, then operating under the disguised name of the “Diogenes” Club.
13As bizarre as the Diogenes’s practises might seem, such an attitude was de rigueur at most London clubs, where bachelors and married men alike could both relax and cultivate an air of exclusivity and high social rank. Roy Porter describes the Victorian clubs as “solid, sober, even stuffy. . . . [They] spanned the private and public spheres, while upholding rank and gender exclusivity.” (Women, of course, were not allowed.) They were also traditionally hostile toward strangers. In London Clubs: Their History and Treasures, Ralph Nevill notes that visitors to these sacred enclaves tended to be treated “like the members’ dogs—they might be left in the hall under proper restraint, but access to any other part of the house, except, perhaps, some cheerless apartment kept as a strangers’ dining-room, was forbidden.” That the Diogenes had a designated Stranger’s Room seems similar to the Athenaeum’s policy of relegating its members’ friends to a small room near the club entrance.
14The Carlton Club was founded in 1832 to fight the supporters of the Reform Bill and to serve as a rallying point for the Tories after their wholesale defeat in the elections. Sir James Damery, of “The Illustrious Client,” was a member of the Carlton.
15The film A Study in Terror (1965) cast the splendid Robert Morley as Mycroft, opposite John Neville’s laudatory Sherlock, and Morley bears
an uncanny resemblance to Sidney Paget’s illustration of Mycroft, reproduced on page 636.
16An employee of a billiard parlour, who assists players and keeps the game’s score. Billiards was immensely fashionable at this time, especially as a pastime of the elite: Queen Victoria had a billiards table installed at Windsor Castle, and Pope Pius IX had one at the Vatican. Watson apparently was devoted to the game (see “The Dancing Men,” in which Holmes remarks upon the chalk on Watson’s hand). The dominant form of the game was English billiards, played with three balls and six pockets. Unfortunately, the popularity of this particular leisure activity meant that, according to billiards historian Robert Byrne, twelve thousand elephants were killed every year to produce the ivory needed to make billiards balls—until 1868, when chemist John Hyatt began fashioning them out of celluloid (which later led to the invention of plastic).
17Official army boots issued to noncommissioned personnel.
18A private of the Royal Engineers.
19Arthur Conan Doyle, in his autobiography Memories and Adventures, relates a similar diagnosis by his mentor Dr. Joseph Bell, who once glanced at a patient and declared, “ ‘Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ‘Not long discharged?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘A Highland regiment?’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ‘A non-com. officer?’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ‘Stationed at Barbados?’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ” Bell then explained to his befuddled students how he had come to those conclusions, observing that “the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British, and the Scottish residents are at present in that particular island.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 86
