He would devour book after book about some particular historical epoch, claiming in some cases to have read more than a hundred books as background. He did no research at all for the Holmes stories, which is no doubt one reason he undervalued them. But after the success of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Strand wanted another twelve stories. Once again Conan Doyle set what he thought an arbitrarily high price, £1,000 for the series, that he was convinced the magazine wouldn’t meet, but once again they jumped at the deal.

The first in the series, “Silver Blaze,” pleased Conan Doyle so much that he bet his wife a shilling she couldn’t solve the mystery. The story has some of the most brilliant writing in the Holmes canon, particularly what is probably the most famous of all Holmes’s deductions: “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” (p. 413), which has come to be known by the prosaic phrase “the dog that didn’t bark.” In polls of various Holmes Societies around the world, it regularly rates as one of the top ten stories. But “Silver Blaze” also illustrates the degree to which Conan Doyle could write complete nonsense and get away with it. In his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle confessed, “My ignorance cried aloud to heaven. I read . . . a very disparaging criticism of the story . . . written clearly by a man who did know, in which he explained the exact penalties which would come upon everyone concerned if they had acted as I described. Half would have been sent to gaol and the other half ruled off the turf forever.” Conan Doyle admitted that he knew little about “the turf,” the English term for the racetrack, and simply wrote what he thought would pass without complaint in the excitement of the reading moment.

“The Yellow Face,” on the other hand, is notable for almost the opposite reasons. The two stories make an instructive contrast. “The Yellow Face” is often voted as one of the ten least-good stories. (There are no bad Holmes stories, mind you, so Holmes devotees never call such lists the “ten worst stories.”) Infidelity is a theme in both stories, but in contrast to John Straker in “Silver Blaze,” who carried on an adulterous affair with a woman who had “a strong partiality for expensive dresses,” in “The Yellow Face” Grant Munro’s suspicion of his wife’s adulterous involvement is only hinted at. He turns out to be so completely at one with her that he lovingly embraces her black American daughter from her previous marriage. This was no small commitment for an Englishman of his time. Our feelings toward the couple are influenced by Watson’s reaction, unique among all the Holmes stories, to Munro’s acceptance of his new reality. “When his answer came it was one of which I love to think.” As virtue is never as exciting as vice, this may be one reason “The Yellow Face” is never highly rated by Sherlockians.

A stronger reason is no doubt that Holmes makes no brilliant deductions at all in “The Yellow Face.” In fact, he embraces an erroneous hypothesis in the beginning and is completely fooled by the outcome. Again, as in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes’s presence makes no difference to the outcome of the case. In comparison to the silly plot of “Silver Blaze,” which falls apart at even the merest scrutiny, “The Yellow Face” is one of the more moving tributes to racial tolerance in all British literature. But because it is part of the Holmes canon, readers bring expectations to it that it doesn’t meet.

Conan Doyle came to his racial sensitivity as a result of his meeting with Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), a black antislavery leader, then U.S. minister to Liberia, when Conan Doyle was ship’s surgeon on the Mayumba in 1882. Garnet was aboard for three days, during which time he impressed Conan Doyle with his intelligence and seriousness. Conan Doyle remained deeply committed to racial justice for the rest of his life.

One last reflection about “The Yellow Face”: Conan Doyle chose the name Grant Munro for this most sympathetic character. Munro is also the name he chose for himself in his autobiographical fiction The Stark Munro Letters.