SECRET 25

Remember Norbury

Watson . . . if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident 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.

—“THE YELLOW FACE”

 

 

 

 

Holmes balanced his extreme sense of self-confidence with a healthy dose of humility. He was smart enough to know that even though he was brilliant, that didn’t mean he would always make the right decision.

In “The Yellow Face,” published in the Strand Magazine in 1893, Conan Doyle gave Holmes his biggest challenge to date: failure. Holmes and Watson are visited by Grant Munro, who lives in Norbury, a small village just outside of London. His wife, Effie, is behaving mysteriously; he believes she is having an affair but has no proof, even though he spies a mysterious masked figure in a nearby cottage she visits regularly. When Holmes learns that she had been married once before, in America, he quickly decides that the mysterious figure is actually her first husband, even though she claimed he had died of yellow fever. It seems obvious enough (to him, anyway) until the masked figure is caught and turns out to be Effie’s young daughter. Effie confesses: Her first husband really is dead, but he had been a black man; thus her daughter is of mixed race. She kept the existence of the child from her second husband because she was afraid he would disown her for once having been married to a minority. In fact, though, Grant Munro “lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.”

The story is famous for not only tackling the prickly subject of interracial marriage (it was 1893, remember), but also taking a strong stand against conventional racist attitudes in Britain. Holmes and Watson are delighted to see the family united and happy, but on the carriage ride home from Norbury, Holmes tells Watson to be on the guard against the detective’s overconfidence in the future. Norbury will be their secret code word, a warning that Holmes is perhaps letting his ego decide the outcome of a case rather than relying on his tried-and-true methods of logic and deduction.

Holmes didn’t obsess over his mistakes (see Secret 6), but he didn’t ignore them, either. He knew there was always a lesson to be learned from analyzing what went wrong; overconfidence can be just as disastrous as coming up with the wrong solution to a mystery. It’s important that we take the same approach in our lives. You know yourself better than anyone; what are your shortcomings, the little tricks of ego that trip you up time and again? Once you’ve identified the problem areas—your own personal Norburys—you can be on your guard against them (and more importantly . . . so can everyone else!).