The Hands of a Mycroft

 One's curiosity is always apt to take a person down some twisty-turny rabbit holes, but Saturday morning a look at at completely ridiculous premise went somewhere completely unexpected. It started simply, with noticing a tweet from Margie Deck looking for a book review refuting the idea that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Jack the Ripper. Doesn't seem like something that needs arguing against, so I followed the link Mark Jone provided to a Doings of Doyle review of a book titled The Strange Case of Dr. Doyle: A Journey into Madness & Mayhem.

The book being reviewed sounded just wonderfully horrible, with a weird narrative of Conan Doyle giving tours of Ripper sights. As the author leads the tour, he keeps spouting weird things he himself has done, and the review does an excellent job of seeing what source material was twisted to get fiction from facts.

The bit that took me off course was when the review reported Conan Doyle's diary saying, "By the way as an instance of distraction of mind, after skinning a seal today I walked away with the two hind flippers in my hand, leaving mittens on the ice."  The book seems to have distorted this into Doyle doing this: "His mittens frozen solid, he thought he would have some fun by cutting off two hind flippers of the seals he had skinned, putting them on his hands as replacements."

That's a dreadfully horrific turn as mental images go, invoking the Kevin Smith film "Tusk" if one was unfortunate enough to have seen that movie. But what makes it all the worse is this passage from the Sherlockian Canon:

"I am glad to meet you, sir," said he, putting out a broad, fat hand like the flipper of a seal.

That was John H. Watson's first impression of meeting Mycroft Holmes, and that description has always haunted me. The fact that Watson would describe his best friend's brother so seems quite mean, and it makes one wonder if Mycroft's hands didn't fully develop in the womb . . . or something worse.

Throw into this the notion that Conan Doyle could have possibly equated seal flippers with hands, either as mittens or costumery, and I had to start wondering what might have been going on with Watson, Mycroft, and Doyle all the more. Or was it just the Mycroft imagery that put that weird twist in the minds of the authors of The Strange Case of Dr. Doyle?

Google searches turn up a line from The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman that reads "I have never, I tell you solemnly, been more in love with anybody or anything than that policeman's seal-flipper mitten . . ."  Of course, the policeman's mitten simply looked like a seal's flipper to the character involved -- not his hand. 

Mycroft Holmes's hands will always concern me, thanks to Watson's remark. And the hint of a Conan Doyle connection lending a Franken-Mycroft to what was already a potentially were-seal situation with Sherlock's pinniman sibling makes matters just that much more concerning.

Or maybe, just as Sherlock was the thinking machine of the family, Mycroft was the pinball machine.

Plainly, the hands of Mycroft Holmes are a route toward madness.