Sherlock Holmes is a government official. Mycroft has a unique civil service position as a kind of human database for all aspects of government policy. He lacks Sherlock's interest in physical investigation, however, preferring to spend his time at the Diogenes Club. Holmes says that he first developed his methods of deduction as an undergraduate; his earliest cases, which he pursued as an amateur, came from fellow university students. A meeting with a classmate's father led him to adopt detection as a profession, and he spent several years after university as a consultant before financial difficulties led him to accept John H.
Diogenes Club writers developed and used the idea that the club was founded as a front for the British secret service. This may have its root in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans", in which Mycroft Holmes is revealed to be the supreme and indispensable brain-trust behind the British government, who pieces together collective government secrets and offers advice on the best way to act. The idea was popularised by "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970), a 1970s motion picture directed by Billy Wilder, and has since been frequently used in pastiches of Conan Doyle's stories as well as the TV