The Adventure of the Yellow Face
"If it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.”
One of the more sentimental stories in the canon, "The Adventure of the Yellow Face" (from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes) is remarkable because Holmes’s deductive powers fail him - and Watson’s romantic sentimentality wins the day. It's also notable in how it specifically addresses race and prejudice in a way the Holmes stories usually avoid.
Does Doyle get some credit for being not quite as awful as some of his contemporaries? Should these people have even become parents? Does Watson really solve the case first? All that and more in today's episode.
Listen to our narration of the story below:
This story was narrated by Alex Gallegos. Born and raised in Colorado, Alex moved to Iowa in 2015. He fell in love with the audio format of storytelling after hearing the original War of the Worlds broadcast, and about the power it held to create imagery in the audience’s mind unmatched by any conceivable feat of cinematography - even by today’s standards.
By day, he is a Systems Administrator, tinkering with computers, technology, and software, but by night, he is... actually pretty much the same thing, just paid less to do it once he’s off the clock.
Further reading:
“Sherlock Holmes and the Cases of Race” by Henry Cuningham
Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
Anything by Zadie Smith, particularly Swing Time
The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips
To Sir, With Love by ER Braithwaite
Loving, dir. Jeff Nichols
Passing, dir. Rebecca Hall
Music credit: The songs “Denmark (Live)” by the Portland Cello Project and 4 Romantic Pieces, Op. 75 - 3. Allegro appassionato, by Antonín Dvořák are featured with an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).