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 short stories that were published under the title "The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes" in 1954. Using his alternate name of H.F. Heard, Gerald Heard wrote three novels about a reclusive beekeeper in the English countryside who goes by the name of Mycroft; he's clearly intended to be Sherlock Holmes, but the books were written before the Doyle estate gave permission for other writers to use the name. The three stories are "A Taste for Honey", "Reply Paid" and "The Notched Hairpin". "A Taste for Honey" was adapted for American TV in 1955 as "Sting of Death," with Boris Karloff as