About Face

The next Sherlock Holmes story (for me at least, as I'm reading an American edition of the stories, strangely presented in a different order) is "The Yellow Face." It's a curious tale, quite strong in some respects and rather weak in others.

Watson opens the narrative by telling us this will be a story of one of the rare occasions where Holmes did not solve the mystery... but that this tale can be told, as the truth behind the mystery was indeed discovered. Holmes is contracted by a man whose wife has recently engaged in strange behavior. When new neighbors moved in nearby, the man was alarmed to see a face with an ominous yellow pallor in the window, and reported the incident to his wife. She subsequently snuck away from the house on multiple occasions to visit these neighbors, making the husband suspicious even despite her protestations that nothing was amiss. She begs him not to pursue the matter, but he goes to Holmes because he must have his answers.

This story requires me to reveal the plot to adequately review it. One of the better aspects of the mystery is the notion that Holmes gets it wrong. He crafts a theory that is in fact exactly the one that I as a reader had crafted just before he articulated it: that the woman's former American husband (whom she'd claimed had died) had returned to blackmail her. The story is well crafted to leave these clues and lead both reader and character to an erroneous conclusion.

However... the real solution of the mystery is less than satisfying. It turns out that the woman's former husband is dead indeed; the new occupants of the house are her child by that first marriage, and the child's governess. The woman's husband was black, and the child the product of their interracial marriage. In hopes to avoid drawing attention to herself, the girl was made to wear a mask whenever she might be seen at the window, explaining the ghostly yellow face seen by Holmes' client.

The only way that Arthur Conan Doyle was able to fool both Holmes and the audience was to omit any of the facts that would have been necessary to solve the mystery. There's no indication that the woman's former husband was black, nor any hint of the mask. The ending is thus unfair; deduction is impossible, given nothing from which to deduce.

But one thing that does save the story somewhat is Doyle's very forward-thinking take on interracial marriage. He does have characters hiding from the stigma of such a union, as befit his time. The wife has kept her secret child from her new husband, thinking he'd never accept the mixed-race girl. Instead, the story resolves with the husband welcoming the girl wholeheartedly and taking her in to raise as his own. Mind you, this tale was written in the 1890s (and set in the 1880s, according to Holmes historians). At that point, we were the better part of a century away from legal, nationwide interracial marriage in the United States -- and many States had laws banning it. And while my understanding is that such marriages were never actually illegal in the United Kingdom, the stigma was certainly still there. So praise is due to Doyle for being ahead of his time on this one. (It atones for the casual bigotry on display in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four.)

Still, the fact that this mystery really doesn't play by fair rules means I can only rate it so high. I give it a C+.