Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Publisher: Bompa Crazy
Rating: WORTHY!
This Sherlock Holmes novelette was published in 1894. Most who know of Sherlock Holmes tend to picture him as solving every case, but real fans of the great detective know that he did not solve them all. Typically the ones at which he failed were, by John Watson's own admission, suppressed, evidently because without a conclusion, they were unsatisfactory cases: "...where he failed it happened too often that no one else succeeded, and that the tale was left forever without a conclusion." He did report one or two, however, such as The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, and this particular case, The Yellow Face, although in this particular case, it's not so much that it went unsolved as that it required no work on the part of Holmes for its resolution.
How it ever came to be titled The Yellow Face (and also known as The Adventure of the Yellow Face) is the only big mystery here! There is no yellow face in it (unless you count the reference to yellow fever)! The only other face that's remarked upon is first described as white.
The story begins with the visit of a man, Grant Munro, who has very recently had cause to doubt his wife, Effie. For three years they have had the perfect marriage, but now she is behaving oddly, first asking for a large sum of her own money, which she had put into his charge upon their marriage, and later leaving the house at odd times visiting the newly arrived neighbor, across the field from their cottage. When Munro confronts her about it, she begs her husband not to pursue it. Effie reassures him, but offers nothing concrete, instead asserting that she cannot tell him what’s going on and asks only that he trust her. This he cannot do, which is why he consults Holmes.
The story which is delivered to Holmes and Watson of Effie's history suggests some possibilities. She was, for a while, resident in the USA, in Alabama (no word on whether she sported a banjo on her knee), married to a fine man named John Hebron. Together they had a daughter, but subsequently, husband and daughter became ill and died of the illness, whereupon she returned to England. About six months after that was when she met and fell in love with Holmes's visitor.
The solution to this simple and pleasant story is itself quite simple, but out of several possibilities, the ones I had in mind were wrong. I felt slightly annoyed with Doyle that he didn’t give me quite sufficient clues to determine the answer more accurately! But I rate this positively, because I did enjoy the story and thought it a remarkably forward-thinking tale.
