Introducing Mycroft Holmes. And he’s just one of the odd things about this story.

To begin with Mycroft, Watson starts things off by saying how he knows nothing of his friend Sherlock’s family, a deficit that gets corrected when Holmes freely offers up that he has a brother who is even more advanced in detective analysis than he is. Which leaves me to wonder why Mycroft had been kept a secret to this point. Unlike the way he is usually portrayed, which is as a sibling rival, the two seem to get along famously. Holmes also says that many of his “most interesting cases” have come to him by way of Mycroft. So it seems strange that his name, or existence, hadn’t come up at any point before this.

Another odd thing with regard to Mycroft is that he is described as being incorrigibly lazy, a man of “no ambition and no energy.” This is fine (hey, I can relate!), and it’s not surprising that there should be another eccentric in the family. But then for the rest of the story Mycroft becomes a man of action more than up to the business of chasing around London wrapping things up with Holmes and Watson and Gregson.

Moving away from the character of Mycroft, another odd thing about the story is the ending. In other Holmes adventures there’s been a quick coda that lets us know what happened to the bad guys if they hadn’t been immediately apprehended. For example, in the previous story collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “The Resident Patient,” we’re told that the trio of baddies died in a shipwreck.

In this case, despite Latimer and Kemp being two of the most vicious villains in the canon, they both get away, and with Sophy! To be sure, there is a postscript about a pair of Englishmen traveling with a woman in Hungary. They are both stabbed to death, and when Holmes reads about their murder he supposes that Sophy has taken her vengeance on her abductors. We’re not given any idea though why he would think this, or how Sophy managed to do it (Latimer, for one, is described as being a strapping fellow), or whatever became of Sophy herself in the end.

“And this was the singular case of the Grecian Interpreter, the explanation of which is still involved in some mystery.” I’ll say. It’s a good read though and plays off expectations in some interesting ways (for example, instead of Holmes helping a pair of youngsters get together he’s more interested in keeping them apart). It also has darker shadows than most of the other stories in the canon, shadows that even the introduction of Mycroft can’t quite dispel.

Holmes index