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.
Sherlock Holmes pastiches in the list of characters, but named in the text. Several characters from the canon appear in Alan Moore's comic book series "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", in which various characters from Victorian fiction are recruited to serve the interests of an alternate-history British Empire. Holmes himself appears only in a flashback during the first series, as he is still presumed dead. Mycroft has a more substantial role in the second series. References in the series suggest Sherlock was a member of an earlier iteration of the League. Moriarty also figures into the first series and the film adaptation. Holmes