A Taste for Honey (20 page)

Silchester wonders early in the narrative, what is this strange man's name? “Mycroft, if you will” (19). “Mycroft is only one of my family names … I have used Mycroft because my full name was once pretty widely known, and I wanted, when I retired, to be quiet and unmolested” (140). So, if Mycroft is a pseudonym and if he achieved fame under his real name, we return to the question that begs to be asked: what
is
Mycroft's “full name”? Silchester was told, but somehow forgets, vaguely explaining, “It was something not unlike Mycroft—Mycroft and then another word, a short one, I think” (140). Two syllables, then one syllable. Hmmm.

Let's turn our attention to other sources. What did H. F. Heard say on the matter? Well, nothing. There is one reference to Mr. Mycroft in the Heard-Vanguard Press correspondence, dated 14 Oct. 1965—some 24 years after the book's initial publication. While discussing particulars surrounding the adaptation of
A Taste for Honey
into the movie
The Deadly Bees
, Heard writes, “When
A Taste for Honey
was published in England Mr. Mycroft's name was changed to Mr. Bowcross—a precaution urged by my British literary agent, Nancy Pollinger, lest the Conan Doyle estate (they are rather grasping it seems) might cause some legal trouble because Sherlock Holmes' brother was named Mycroft.” Substantiating Pollinger's warning is a 1980 letter from a Sherlockian to Vanguard Press stating that in the 1940s the Conan Doyle estate was litigating against most Sherlock Holmes pastiche writers. Jon L. Lellenberg confirms the same in the Winter 1980 issue of
Baker Street Miscellanea
.

Actually Amicus Productions, which produced
The Deadly Bees
, was contractually permitted to change the novel's characters and plot, which they did. They eliminated Mr. Mycroft and instead created the sociopathic H. W. Manfred character, which only superficially mimics some of Mr. Mycroft's sleuthing and beekeeping characteristics. How did this come about? Back in 1946, Baker Street Irregulars (“BSI”) founder Christopher Morley glowingly wrote, “
A Taste for Honey
is one of the greatest undramatized plays that has ever been written.”
¹
Amicus co-producer Milton Subotsky first discussed with Heard in about 1948 the possibility of making a play from his novel. “Subotsky's first idea was to adapt it into a play with only two characters. What appealed to him was reversing the roles of the book's hero and villain.”
²
Because of this role reversal, two events occurred. First, according to Subotsky when Amicus decided to make a film of the novel, “One of the provisions in the obtaining of the rights was a stipulation that if we did this, the name Mycroft, which H. F. Heard used in two other novels for the detective, be changed.”
³
Second, Subotsky's “detective as villain”
⁴
character was dubbed Manfred, and it is my speculation that Manfred was devised as a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde alter ego to Mr. Mycroft in order to conform to Subotsky's vision for the character. In any event, Heard was permitted by contract to retain the rights to the Mr. Mycroft name and character in his subsequent writings. However, he produced no new Mycroft adventures after 1949.

The Deadly Bees
was directed by noted director and cinematographer Freddie Francis and originally scripted by
Psycho
screenwriter Robert Bloch. Bloch's original 1967 screenplay envisioned Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee in the lead roles.
⁵
But Francis hated Bloch's script, calling it “awful,”
⁶
so he recruited a British stage-comedy writer, Anthony Marriott, to rewrite it, and he received the support of Subotsky's partner Max J. Rosenberg in this undertaking. When Subotsky viewed the new script he abhorred it, describing it as “… dreadful, one of the worst scripts I've ever read.”
⁷
But Francis and Rosenberg won out, and thus the movie proceeded without Mr. Mycroft and without Bloch's original script. When it debuted in April 1967 the movie was greeted with mixed reviews. Heard suffered a major, incapacitating stroke in October 1966, so for better or for worse he never saw
The Deadly Bees
. Asked years later if he ever had seen the film, Bloch replied, “I've never had the stomach for viewing deformed offspring.”
⁸

Incidentally, the only movie or television appearance of Mr. Mycroft was Boris Karloff's portrayal of the astute detective in the ABC TV adaptation of
A Taste for Honey
, which aired on 22 Feb. 1955. The episode, which appeared on
The Elgin Hour
, was titled, “The Sting of Death,” and featured Robert Flemyng as Silchester, Martyn Green as Hargrove (i.e., Heregrove), and Hermione Gingold as Alice. The program won a 1956 Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “Best Episode in a TV Series.”

Source: ABCTV/
Baker Street Miscellanea

What did Heard's publisher Vanguard Press assert? Plenty. When Vanguard reissued
A Taste for Honey
in a September 1980 omnibus titled
The Amazing Mycroft Mysteries
, they brought upon themselves a heap of trouble by committing four sins of omission (and inclusion). First they unabashedly splashed on the book jacket's cover, “Three cases solved by Sherlock Holmes's brother.” For the introduction they brazenly reprinted the section on Mycroft Holmes from BSI member Jack Tracy's recently published
Encyclopedia Sherlockiania
. Then they audaciously declared this compilation to be “a complete collection” of the Mycroft catalog when in fact they omitted two Mr. Mycroft short stories that had first appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
during the 1940s. And finally, adding insult to injury, Vanguard erred by misprinting the page order of a small section of
The Notched Hairpin
, one of the three Mr. Mycroft novels, which
Newsweek
critic Walter Clemons gleefully noted in his 9 Feb. 1981 review. Unforgivable.

Following publication of
The Amazing Mycroft Mysteries
, Vanguard was buffeted with a spate of riled letters from several prominent Sherlockians, most of whom were members of the Baker Street Irregulars. These indignant fellows issued mild to blistering reprimands for Vanguard's “asinine,” “inexcusable,” and “very sloppy” assertion that Mr. Mycroft was actually Mycroft Holmes. One angry letter called for the firing of the responsible party at Vanguard. Did Vanguard take such criticism lying down? Of course not. They proceeded to dig themselves an even deeper hole by issuing a “White Paper” toward the end of September 1980, which attempted to defend their Mycroft Holmes position. Clemons was not alone when he called Vanguard's ill-advised backpedaling a “lame effort.” However, as one shrewd Sherlockian noted, all this helped to sell more books.
⁹

In fact, as documented above, there are more obvious parallels between Mr. Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes than with Sherlock's enigmatic older brother. While Sherlock is noted for his passionate approach to crime solving, as Prof. Gillis writes, the slothful Mycroft Holmes, “has no ambition and no energy … he will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions,” according to his legendary sibling. In
The Greek Interpreter
, Mycroft largely confirms his brother's observation: “Sherlock has all the energy of the family.” Brilliant and reclusive, Mycroft Holmes appears in four of Conan Doyle's stories, but his character bears little resemblance to the dynamic, resourceful, and energetic Mr. Mycroft of Heard's conjuring.

So what did the Sherlockian community claim to know that Vanguard sorely missed? One by one, these Sherlock Holmes experts proclaimed in no uncertain terms that Mr. Mycroft was really none other than Sherlock Holmes. Gasp! For example, Clemons wrote, “And what other famous detective could be described as having the face of an ‘unpolitical Dante'?” Glenn J. Shea commented, “A gentleman of Mr. Mycroft's methods, living in retirement in the English countryside and raising bees, makes the game almost a foregone conclusion.”
¹⁰
The authors of two letters sent to Vanguard insisted that Mycroft was a name that Sherlock adopted to retain anonymity during his retirement. This caught Vanguard off guard and sent them scrambling. But, was Mr. Mycroft
really
Sherlock Holmes? To find out, we need to examine even more clues.

In the September 1945 issue of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
(Vol. 6, No. 24), the editor announced that H. F. Heard had read “an advance proof” of the editor's introduction to the Mr. Mycroft short story that appeared therein titled, “The Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist.” Now, this same introduction states that Heard's story was a pastiche of “The Great Master Himself,” “He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named,” and “The One and Only.” Heard could have protested this prior to publication, but presumably he did not. In referencing this event, BSI member and Sherlockian author Paul D. Herbert's 16 Nov. 1980 letter to Vanguard notes that Heard never admitted that Mr. Mycroft was Sherlock … nor did he deny it. Herbert continues, “If Heard intended Mr. Mycroft to be someone else other than Sherlock … you would think he would bring out further clues in the later stories in order to correct this mistaken identity.
¹¹
The fact that he doesn't is further proof that Sherlock is the man.” When Vanguard received this letter they queried Jay Michael Barrie, then literary executor of H. F. Heard and secretary and business manager to Heard for more than two decades. Barrie's reply in part states, “Regarding why Heard refused to comment on Ellery Queen's assertion that Mr. Mycroft was really Sherlock Holmes—knowing Heard I would suspect that he recognized that leaving it ‘up in the air' might be good publicity and so he kept mum on the subject.” So, this was a sly move on Heard's part, leaving the reader to guess.

Source: Jay Michael Barrie

Barrie's notes contain a most interesting, cryptic conjecture—“GH & CW—Mycroft and Silchester.” Translation: “Gerald (‘H. F.') Heard and Christopher Wood might be the inspirations for the Mr. Mycroft and Sydney Silchester characters.” Heard worked as the BBC's first science commentator, and his trademark insatiable intellectual curiosity helped cement his reputation as a formidable polymath. Heard had known the unconventional, independently wealthy Wood (1900–1976) in England since the mid-1920s, and they were described as “two handsome and elegant young men in light-coloured tweeds.”
¹²
Heard biographer Professor Alison Falby writes that they “were like two sides of one person.”
¹³
The two im-migrated to the United States in April 1937 along with the Aldous Huxley family. In the early 1940s Heard sometimes stayed in a room at Wood's lush, sprawling Laguna Beach villa. The piano-playing, reclusive Wood, heir to a grocery fortune, was known as, “the neighborhood eccentric.”
¹⁴
Meals at the Wood residence were served by an equally eccentric servant named Josephine, whom Christopher Isherwood described as an “ancient, skinny, talkative Irish cook.”
¹⁵
So, along with the possible Heard-Wood inspirations for, respectively, the loquacious Mycroft and the solitary Silchester, we now have a potential inspiration for Alice, Silchester's over-the-top housemaid in
A Taste for Honey
, who like Josephine possesses a “flowing tongue” (8–9).

What other clues lay in our tracks? I could find no evidence of any correspondence between Heard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although the two theoretically could have crossed paths in England, Alison Falby writes, “I haven't come across anything about Doyle in any of my notes. Doyle was a member of the Society for Psychical Research from 1894 to 1930 and although Heard dabbled in psychical research in Cambridge he really only became active in the Society after 1930.”
¹⁶
Longtime Heard acquaintance and retired professor of philosophy William H. Forthman notes that Heard “rarely spoke of his mysteries in my presence.”
¹⁷
It is no stretch of the imagination to speculate that Heard, born in 1889, most surely would have read Sherlock Holmes during his youth, as Sherlock first appeared in print in 1887. Longstanding BSI member Peter Blau comments, “It seems to me that it's quite unlikely that anyone as literate as Heard would not have read the stories … and perhaps even more important, it seems to me that it's quite unlikely that he could have created Mr. Mycroft without having read the stories … otherwise everything is just accidental.”
¹⁸