by H. F. Heard
There! I have forgotten the name he gave himself. It was something not unlike Mycroft—Mycroft and then another word, a short one, I think. But I was too bothered to memorize still another set of names, especially as it was quite clear that they could really be no defense to me. I had known him as Mycroft, had known both his capacities and limitations. I could not see how the one would become the greater or the other less by calling him by another name. As Mycroft we had struggled along together through this upsetting business. I suppose he or Destiny had got me out, but only at the cost of leaving me under an abiding apprehension. I could not feel that there was anything magical in either of his names. It came over me again, and this time with complete conviction, after seeing this last proof of what he thought to be adequate defense, that if I were ever to be safe I would be safer and more comfortable by myself.
“Thank you, Mr. ________”; I think I called him by the new name he evidently so much prized, but which awoke no meaning or association in my mind. “Thank you. I am obliged, and you must forgive what may seem perhaps an apparent churlishness. But I think I will again retire into my shell.”
He took my breakaway, I am glad to say, with composure. We were parting without a scene, and I was grateful for that.
“Very well,” was all he said.
I thought, then, that perhaps I ought not to leave it quite there but might give some sort of explanation of my action, of why I could not think our continued alliance would add to my safety.
“You see,” I said, “now that I do know your real name, I have to own I have never heard of you before.”
Then, I must own, he looked amazed—perhaps the only time I had seen him profoundly surprised, and he turned away without a word.
For a moment I felt an immense relief. The feeling grew. I had not anyone to interfere with me any more. I was once more my own master. The relief lasted a couple of days. Then the other darker shadow, the shadow of apprehension, that I was an accessory to murder, if only to counter-murder, settled down on me. That is why I have been driven to write all this. If the worst comes to the worst, after all, Mycroft did it, not I.
Afterword
WHO IS MR. MYCROFT?
John Roger Barrie
So, who is Mr. Mycroft? And does it really matter? Well, yes and no. As Prof. Stacy Gillis opines in her erudite foreword to this elegant Blue Dolphin reissue, “Whether or not this is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes or a story about his lesser-known brother is not vital …” The Mr. Mycroft saga stands on its own, and ultimately we enjoy it on the basis of its own merit. But that still leaves us with one pressing question, who is Mr. Mycroft?
In order to find an answer, we’ll examine some of Mr. Mycroft’s personality traits, nuances of character, idiosyncrasies, physical attributes, and personal history, occasionally comparing them with the brothers Holmes. Although there are three Mr. Mycroft novels and two short stories in the Mycroft canon, we will restrict ourselves to the facts revealed in H. F. Heard’s first offering, A Taste for Honey. Here we learn that Mr. Mycroft’s visage reveals “a serene face”; his comportment betrays “a long-practiced calm” (14, 24). He possesses “keen eyes … thin lips” and a “long nose” (16, 80). (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes that Sherlock Holmes’ “eyes were sharp and piercing”; he had “thin lips” and a “hawk-like” nose.) Mr. Mycroft’s writing style is capable of producing “quite beautifully spaced and shaped Roman letters” (13). He is sophisticated: “My host knew about food and also about wine” (25). (Sherlock has detailed knowledge of fine wines.)
Brimming with a self-confidence that teeters on arrogance, Mr. Mycroft displays “a glint of superiority” (27). (Humility and meekness were never among Sherlock Holmes’ weaknesses.) He berates his own shortcomings, almost chiding himself for nearly ignoring a clue: “‘Am I getting senile!’ he exclaimed. ‘Would I have overlooked that twenty years ago?’” (32).
Mr. Mycroft is retired. The novel’s persnickety protagonist, Sydney Silchester, speculates that Mycroft’s pre-retirement career might have been that of a doctor (69) or an actor (111). (Sherlock did in fact impersonate a number of persons, from a priest to a plumber.) But Mycroft provides sufficient clues to dispel both conjectures, at least superficially. He is “an old hunter … a veteran adventurer” (78). “All my life I have been estimating human intelligence not by its books or words but by its tracks” (18). He further confesses, “I know something of mortal risks …” (93). “I know more of bad men than of bad bees” (31).
In fact, Mr. Mycroft knows quite well the criminal mind. Referring to the novel’s villain Heregrove, Mycroft declares, “I have known murderers as ingenious and far less careful” (86). Moreover he observes, “He murdered his wife with a simple ingenuity which I have myself not met with elsewhere in the records of homicidal crime” (69). He is well versed in the law: “I know something of the rules which men have made in attempting to save the innocent and helpless from the ruthless strong” (135).
Mr. Mycroft possesses a well-honed manner of investigation: “… the clever criminal is just the man who makes a complete, amnesic slip every now and then, so that you have only to dog him long enough for him to let an utterly damning clue fall into your hand” (91). He proclaims, “… cases such as these I have found can only be grasped—and caught” (he added after a pause) “if one understands much detail which at first sight seems irrelevant” (24–25). (Near the end of The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane, Sherlock describes himself as having “a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”) Mr. Mycroft further notes, “… like all copyists or forgers of signatures or handwriting, I copied it upside down. That is the only safe way of preventing tricks of one’s own handwriting from appearing in the letters and words which you wish to render facsimile” (126). (Not unsurprisingly Sherlock is an expert cryptanalyst. In The Adventure of the Dancing Men he relates to Watson, “I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writings.”)
In order to thwart Heregrove, Mr. Mycroft administers his own brand of preventative justice. (Sherlock, too, would occasionally break the law if it helped him solve a case.) Mr. Mycroft tellingly divulges, “A man like that gets the habit, the taste for malicious power. It grows, and it is harder to break than an addiction for morphia. I know” (32). (Once in a while Sherlock took to using cocaine and morphine.) And finally, Mr. Mycroft confesses, “… when I was working, I often found that it helped to talk over a problem with an interested if less absorbed mind” (17). (In our Sherlockian parallel, one wonders if this “interested if less absorbed mind” might have been a certain doctor late of the Army Medical Department …)
Why did Mr. Mycroft retire? “I came down here to study bees. Honey to me is simply a by-product I must dispose of” (17–18). (This is a revealing admission. For in The Second Stain, we find Sir Arthur’s famous detective having retired to a life of beekeeping, even writing a book on the subject—Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.) Mr. Mycroft owns a laboratory (18, 97). (Sherlock was a chemist.) Mycroft repeatedly demonstrates a keen knowledge of botany: “… he prattled about flowers and used a lot of technical terms” (112). (In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes is said to possess knowledge of botany, although he “knows nothing of practical gardening.”)
Silchester wonders early in the narrative, what is this strange man’s name? “Mycroft, if you will” (19). “Mycroft is only one of my family names … I have used Mycroft because my full name was once pretty widely known, and I wanted, when I retired, to be quiet and unmolested” (140). So, if Mycroft is a pseudonym and if he achieved fame under his real name, we return to the question that begs to be asked: what is Mycroft’s “full name”? Silchester was told, but somehow forgets, vaguely explaining, “It was something not unlike Mycroft—Mycroft and then another word, a short one, I think” (140). Two syllables, then one syllable. Hmmm.
Let’s turn our attention to other sources. What did H. F. Heard say on the matter? Well, nothing. There is o
ne reference to Mr. Mycroft in the Heard-Vanguard Press correspondence, dated 14 Oct. 1965—some 24 years after the book’s initial publication. While discussing particulars surrounding the adaptation of A Taste for Honey into the movie The Deadly Bees, Heard writes, “When A Taste for Honey was published in England Mr. Mycroft’s name was changed to Mr. Bowcross—a precaution urged by my British literary agent, Nancy Pollinger, lest the Conan Doyle estate (they are rather grasping it seems) might cause some legal trouble because Sherlock Holmes’ brother was named Mycroft.” Substantiating Pollinger’s warning is a 1980 letter from a Sherlockian to Vanguard Press stating that in the 1940s the Conan Doyle estate was litigating against most Sherlock Holmes pastiche writers. Jon L. Lellenberg confirms the same in the Winter 1980 issue of Baker Street Miscellanea.
Actually Amicus Productions, which produced The Deadly Bees, was contractually permitted to change the novel’s characters and plot, which they did. They eliminated Mr. Mycroft and instead created the sociopathic H. W. Manfred character, which only superficially mimics some of Mr. Mycroft’s sleuthing and beekeeping characteristics. How did this come about? Back in 1946, Baker Street Irregulars (“BSI”) founder Christopher Morley glowingly wrote, “A Taste for Honey is one of the greatest undramatized plays that has ever been written.”1 Amicus co-producer Milton Subotsky first discussed with Heard in about 1948 the possibility of making a play from his novel. “Subotsky’s first idea was to adapt it into a play with only two characters. What appealed to him was reversing the roles of the book’s hero and villain.”2 Because of this role reversal, two events occurred. First, according to Subotsky when Amicus decided to make a film of the novel, “One of the provisions in the obtaining of the rights was a stipulation that if we did this, the name Mycroft, which H. F. Heard used in two other novels for the detective, be changed.”3 Second, Subotsky’s “detective as villain”4 character was dubbed Manfred, and it is my speculation that Manfred was devised as a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde alter ego to Mr. Mycroft in order to conform to Subotsky’s vision for the character. In any event, Heard was permitted by contract to retain the rights to the Mr. Mycroft name and character in his subsequent writings. However, he produced no new Mycroft adventures after 1949.
The Deadly Bees was directed by noted director and cinematographer Freddie Francis and originally scripted by Psycho screenwriter Robert Bloch. Bloch’s original 1967 screenplay envisioned Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee in the lead roles.5 But Francis hated Bloch’s script, calling it “awful,”6 so he recruited a British stage-comedy writer, Anthony Marriott, to rewrite it, and he received the support of Subotsky’s partner Max J. Rosenberg in this undertaking. When Subotsky viewed the new script he abhorred it, describing it as “… dreadful, one of the worst scripts I’ve ever read.”7 But Francis and Rosenberg won out, and thus the movie proceeded without Mr. Mycroft and without Bloch’s original script. When it debuted in April 1967 the movie was greeted with mixed reviews. Heard suffered a major, incapacitating stroke in October 1966, so for better or for worse he never saw The Deadly Bees. Asked years later if he ever had seen the film, Bloch replied, “I’ve never had the stomach for viewing deformed offspring.”8
Incidentally, the only movie or television appearance of Mr. Mycroft was Boris Karloff’s portrayal of the astute detective in the ABC TV adaptation of A Taste for Honey, which aired on 22 Feb. 1955. The episode, which appeared on The Elgin Hour, was titled, “The Sting of Death,” and featured Robert Flemyng as Silchester, Martyn Green as Hargrove (i.e., Heregrove), and Hermione Gingold as Alice. The program won a 1956 Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “Best Episode in a TV Series.”
Source: ABCTV/Baker Street Miscellanea
What did Heard’s publisher Vanguard Press assert? Plenty. When Vanguard reissued A Taste for Honey in a September 1980 omnibus titled The Amazing Mycroft Mysteries, they brought upon themselves a heap of trouble by committing four sins of omission (and inclusion). First they unabashedly splashed on the book jacket’s cover, “Three cases solved by Sherlock Holmes’s brother.” For the introduction they brazenly reprinted the section on Mycroft Holmes from BSI member Jack Tracy’s recently published Encyclopedia Sherlockiania. Then they audaciously declared this compilation to be “a complete collection” of the Mycroft catalog when in fact they omitted two Mr. Mycroft short stories that had first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine during the 1940s. And finally, adding insult to injury, Vanguard erred by misprinting the page order of a small section of The Notched Hairpin, one of the three Mr. Mycroft novels, which Newsweek critic Walter Clemons gleefully noted in his 9 Feb. 1981 review. Unforgivable.
Following publication of The Amazing Mycroft Mysteries, Vanguard was buffeted with a spate of riled letters from several prominent Sherlockians, most of whom were members of the Baker Street Irregulars. These indignant fellows issued mild to blistering reprimands for Vanguard’s “asinine,” “inexcusable,” and “very sloppy” assertion that Mr. Mycroft was actually Mycroft Holmes. One angry letter called for the firing of the responsible party at Vanguard. Did Vanguard take such criticism lying down? Of course not. They proceeded to dig themselves an even deeper hole by issuing a “White Paper” toward the end of September 1980, which attempted to defend their Mycroft Holmes position. Clemons was not alone when he called Vanguard’s ill-advised backpedaling a “lame effort.” However, as one shrewd Sherlockian noted, all this helped to sell more books.9
In fact, as documented above, there are more obvious parallels between Mr. Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes than with Sherlock’s enigmatic older brother. While Sherlock is noted for his passionate approach to crime solving, as Prof. Gillis writes, the slothful Mycroft Holmes, “has no ambition and no energy … he will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions,” according to his legendary sibling. In The Greek Interpreter, Mycroft largely confirms his brother’s observation: “Sherlock has all the energy of the family.” Brilliant and reclusive, Mycroft Holmes appears in four of Conan Doyle’s stories, but his character bears little resemblance to the dynamic, resourceful, and energetic Mr. Mycroft of Heard’s conjuring.
So what did the Sherlockian community claim to know that Vanguard sorely missed? One by one, these Sherlock Holmes experts proclaimed in no uncertain terms that Mr. Mycroft was really none other than Sherlock Holmes. Gasp! For example, Clemons wrote, “And what other famous detective could be described as having the face of an ‘unpolitical Dante’?” Glenn J. Shea commented, “A gentleman of Mr. Mycroft’s methods, living in retirement in the English countryside and raising bees, makes the game almost a foregone conclusion.”10 The authors of two letters sent to Vanguard insisted that Mycroft was a name that Sherlock adopted to retain anonymity during his retirement. This caught Vanguard off guard and sent them scrambling. But, was Mr. Mycroft really Sherlock Holmes? To find out, we need to examine even more clues.
In the September 1945 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Vol. 6, No. 24), the editor announced that H. F. Heard had read “an advance proof” of the editor’s introduction to the Mr. Mycroft short story that appeared therein titled, “The Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist.” Now, this same introduction states that Heard’s story was a pastiche of “The Great Master Himself,” “He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named,” and “The One and Only.” Heard could have protested this prior to publication, but presumably he did not. In referencing this event, BSI member and Sherlockian author Paul D. Herbert’s 16 Nov. 1980 letter to Vanguard notes that Heard never admitted that Mr. Mycroft was Sherlock … nor did he deny it. Herbert continues, “If Heard intended Mr. Mycroft to be someone else other than Sherlock … you would think he would bring out further clues in the later stories in order to correct this mistaken identity.11 The fact that he doesn’t is further proof that Sherlock is the man.” When Vanguard received this letter they queried Jay Michael Barrie, then literary executor of H. F. Heard and secretary and business manager to Heard for more than two decades. Barrie’s reply in part states, “Regard
ing why Heard refused to comment on Ellery Queen’s assertion that Mr. Mycroft was really Sherlock Holmes—knowing Heard I would suspect that he recognized that leaving it ‘up in the air’ might be good publicity and so he kept mum on the subject.” So, this was a sly move on Heard’s part, leaving the reader to guess.
Source: Jay Michael Barrie
Barrie’s notes contain a most interesting, cryptic conjecture—“GH & CW—Mycroft and Silchester.” Translation: “Gerald (‘H. F.’) Heard and Christopher Wood might be the inspirations for the Mr. Mycroft and Sydney Silchester characters.” Heard worked as the BBC’s first science commentator, and his trademark insatiable intellectual curiosity helped cement his reputation as a formidable polymath. Heard had known the unconventional, independently wealthy Wood (1900–1976) in England since the mid-1920s, and they were described as “two handsome and elegant young men in light-coloured tweeds.”12 Heard biographer Professor Alison Falby writes that they “were like two sides of one person.”13 The two im-migrated to the United States in April 1937 along with the Aldous Huxley family. In the early 1940s Heard sometimes stayed in a room at Wood’s lush, sprawling Laguna Beach villa. The piano-playing, reclusive Wood, heir to a grocery fortune, was known as, “the neighborhood eccentric.”14 Meals at the Wood residence were served by an equally eccentric servant named Josephine, whom Christopher Isherwood described as an “ancient, skinny, talkative Irish cook.”15 So, along with the possible Heard-Wood inspirations for, respectively, the loquacious Mycroft and the solitary Silchester, we now have a potential inspiration for Alice, Silchester’s over-the-top housemaid in A Taste for Honey, who like Josephine possesses a “flowing tongue” (8–9).
What other clues lay in our tracks? I could find no evidence of any correspondence between Heard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although the two theoretically could have crossed paths in England, Alison Falby writes, “I haven’t come across anything about Doyle in any of my notes. Doyle was a member of the Society for Psychical Research from 1894 to 1930 and although Heard dabbled in psychical research in Cambridge he really only became active in the Society after 1930.”16 Longtime Heard acquaintance and retired professor of philosophy William H. Forthman notes that Heard “rarely spoke of his mysteries in my presence.”17 It is no stretch of the imagination to speculate that Heard, born in 1889, most surely would have read Sherlock Holmes during his youth, as Sherlock first appeared in print in 1887. Longstanding BSI member Peter Blau comments, “It seems to me that it’s quite unlikely that anyone as literate as Heard would not have read the stories … and perhaps even more important, it seems to me that it’s quite unlikely that he could have created Mr. Mycroft without having read the stories … otherwise everything is just accidental.”18
