A Conversation with David Dickinson

We are delighted to welcome crime novelist David Dickinson to Omnimystery News today.

David is the author of a series of historical mysteries featuring Lord Francis Powerscourt, and more recently a series of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes's older brother Mycroft.

We recently had the opportunity to talk to David about this new series.

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Omnimystery News: Where did the idea of writing a series of adventures from the perspective of Mycroft Holmes come from?

David Dickinson: Last autumn I was asked by Richard Foreman of Endeavour Press to write a series of short series about Sherlock Holmes's elder brother Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft only appears in a small number of the original Conan Doyle short stories, but I knew from the beginning that I would have to try to re-capture the flavor of the original. Serious Holmes fans would not thank you for re-inventing one of their favorite characters and turning him into James Bond. So I have tried in stories like Mycroft Holmes and the Adventure of the Silver Birches or Mycroft Holmes and the Bankers Conclave to keep within the framework of the original, while introducing, slowly but surely I hope, new elements that would not seem out of place with the Mycroft of the "Adventure of the Greek Interpreter".

Photo provided courtesy of
David Dickinson

OMN: Did you adopt a similar format for your Mycroft Holmes stories as that used by Conan Doyle?

DD: In a word, yes. These are detective stories, pure and simple. Mycroft solves the mystery by power of reasoning, a power he is said in the original stories to possess to an even greater degree than his brother. There are no gun fights, no aerial chases, not even any mean streets down which a man must go. It's pure detection. Using the words "Conan Doyle" should leave the readers in no doubt about what they are going to get.

OMN: It seems we're all told to write about what you know. How much of "you" is in these stories?

DD: A great deal, I suspect! I have always been interested in finance and economics. Mycroft Holmes is Auditor of all Government Departments for the British Government, a very powerful position indeed. In two of the stories he has to deal with threats to the nation's currency and economic stability. I was unable to press Professor Moriarty into service, as he is at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, but I have invented a new villain, a fanatical German aristocrat usually referred to only as The Count. He always manages to escape before Mycroft or Inspector Lestrade, also brought back alive from the Holmes canon, can clap him in prison! I suspect that when I write a story where the Count is finally put behind bars, that will be the end of my love affair with Mycroft.

OMN: How did you go about expanding on the already existing character profile of Mycroft Holmes?

DD: I am fortunate in that the broad outline of Mycroft Holmes has been created already by Conan Doyle, his idleness, his great powers, his sedentary life rotating between his rooms in Pall Mall, his Government Offices and the Diogenes Club near his apartment, where members are not allowed to speak except in the Strangers Room. I always read a Sherlock Holmes short story before I start writing one of my Mycrofts and attempt to drop in various new facets of his character in each story. Inspector Lestrade I have already mentioned. Mrs. Hudson has come to look after him as she looked after his brother in Baker Street. In one story, The Adventure of the Naval Engineer, Mycroft is framed for murder by the wicked Count and incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs. There he secures the help of a ragamuffin youth called Jaikie and a gang of juvenile criminals called the Du Cane Road Irregulars, based on the Baker Street Irregulars who helped Sherlock.

OMN: 221B Baker Street must be one of the most famous addresses in all of crime fiction. What is Mycroft Holmes's London like?

DD: These new stories are set in a real place, which is also a fictional place. You can still walk past Sherlock Holmes's rooms in London's Baker Street. Pall Mall where Mycroft lived is still there and remarkably unchanged. The Government Offices where he worked now house the offices of The Treasury and Her Majesty's Customs and Excise, surely an appropriate development from the Audit Office of all Government Departments. I have tried to be faithful to the Mycroft locations as Conan Doyle was to Sherlock's. I have walked Mycroft's route from Pall Mall to his offices a number of times. I have a large number of photographs of the streets and the buildings I can refer to. I know the building where the Diogenes Club was situated, but I am not going to reveal it!

OMN: What are your hobbies, interests outside of writing crime fiction? Do any of these activities find their way into your books?

DD: Before Mycroft Holmes, I wrote a series of novels set in roughly the same period about a detective called Lord Francis Powerscourt. I have always been interested in grand houses like the ones maintained by The National Trust. Various of their finer properties appear in the stories. I have long been interested in fine art and fine wine. Powerscourt spends one entire novel, Death of an Old Master, on the trail of an art forger and related murder mysteries, and another, Death of a Wine Merchant, about a murder at a wedding involving one of London's grandest wine dynasties. I was born in Ireland and still love the place very much. Death on the Holy Mountain is set in the west of Ireland near the place where I used to live. When I was young I played a lot of croquet. In Mycroft Holmes and The Case of the Missing Popes Mycroft himself wields a croquet mallet and tells how brother Sherlock used to cheat when they played together in their youth!

OMN: Are there any authors whose books you rush out to buy as soon as they are published? What other types of books/genres do you read?

DD: I have just metaphorically rushed out and bought Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall. I say metaphorically because I actually bought Bring up the Bodies on Kindle. I like a number of classic detective story authors, Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell. In his early novels about the Cold War and George Smiley I have always thought John le Carre spoke for an entire generation, born to rule the waves, now living in a small island where they can scarcely pay the bills. I still read George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. My favorite novel of the last century is not as well known as it should be. Vasily Grossman's account of life in Russia during and after the Second World War, Life and Fate, is one of the finest and most moving novels of all time. If you read nothing else this year, make this the one!

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David Dickinson is the author of the Lord Powerscourt series of historical mysteries. David also worked for the BBC as the editor of both Newsnight and Panorama, two of its most prestigious news and current affairs programmes.

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There are currently five adventures in the Mycroft Holmes series of short stories by David Dickinson.

Mycroft Holmes and The Adventure of the Silver Birches

Inspector Lestrade was a worried man. He was facing the biggest case of his career. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Governor of the Bank of England had learnt through a variety of sources – a private bank in Vienna, an Anglophile moneylender in Munich, a reliable tip off from the Casino in Monte Carlo – that Britain's enemies were trying to debase the currency.

Sherlock Holmes has retired to keep his bees in Sussex, Dr Watson is curing the sick. So Lestrade turns to Holmes's elder brother Mycroft, still keeping to his unchanging routine between his rooms in Pall Mall, the Government Offices where he audits all Government Departments, and the silent quarters of the Diogenes Club. Mycroft tracks the gang through the banks and Treasuries of Europe, his brain travelling faster than the swiftest express train. Will Mycroft and Lestrade solve the mystery? And who is the mysterious stranger who led them to the gang's hiding place and then vanished, last seen striding rapidly into the fog?

The other titles are …

Mycroft Holmes and The Adventure of the Naval Engineer (Kindle / Nook / iTunes)

Mycroft Holmes and The Case of the Missing Popes (Kindle / Nook / iTunes)

Mycroft Holmes And The Banker's Conclave (Kindle)

Mycroft Holmes and Murder at the Diogenes Club (Kindle)