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 (2009 film) it out further. Some sequences in the movie were more than suggested by uncredited incidents found in a 1979 novel "Enter the Lion: A Posthumous Memoir of Mycroft Holmes". Lord Blackwood's character was developed as a nod to Victorian interests in spiritualism and the later influence of Aleister Crowley. The producer felt he was "almost clever" pitting Holmes, who has an almost supernatural ability to solve crimes, against a supposedly supernatural villain. The plot point, moreover, nods to the Holmesian tale of "The Hound of the Baskervilles", where a string of seemingly supernatural events is finally explained through intuitive reasoning