Mystery Cases

Mystery cases

“The Yellow Face” is a short story where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle narrates the conflict between Mr. Grant Munro and his wife Effie. She says that her first husband and child had died of yellow fever back in Atlanta. Mr. Munro fells in love with this lady when she moves to Pinner, Middlesex. This happily married couple starts having problems when Mr. Munro discovered that she is keeping a secret from him, secret that is related to their new neighbors living in the next door cottage. He looks for Sherlock Holmes help to dissolve the mystery of the yellow-face watching him out of one of the upper windows and what his wife is hidden. They discovered that the strange person in the cottage is Effie’s daughter, the product of her multi-racial marriage. When Munro faces the true, he “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 Purloined Letter is one of Edgar Allan Poe's detective stories. A letter, which contents would highly compromise the Queen of France, has been stolen. C. Auguste Dupin and the narrator are consulted by the Prefect of the Parisian police to try to find a letter. The police know who has it, but after two very detailed searches to the Minister D. place, they could not locate the letter. Dupin and his partner also searched the apartment, but contrary to the police, they looked in obvious places, where they were able to find the letter.

Mr. Grant Munro presents an internal conflict. He doesn’t know what to do with his wife secret, he loves her too much but he doesn’t want to be blind to the facts. He needs external advice to be able to discover the true. After the mystery is unveiled, he learns to accept it as it is. Effie has a conflict with society, she is afraid that her daughter becomes their neighbors’ gossip, because she has African-American heritage. Sherlock Holmes and his partner do not present any conflict during the narration. However, on Purloined Letter the conflict is a little more difficult to find, but it is about the conflict is man vs. society. The French Queen is afraid to have the letter open to the public because she could lose her power. The way how the investigations were performed was only to protect her from the public opinion.

Mr. Grant Munro appears to be a man of strong nature. Sherlock Holmes describes him as “a muscular man, left-handed, with an excellent set of teeth, careless in his habits, and with no need to practice economy.” He represents a dynamic character; his heart is melted when he meets his wife’s daughter. Effie is a lady who widowed when she was on her early twenties. She seems to be a fragile person. She loves and trusts her husband, he gives testimony of that “she made over all her property to me”. Her character gains mystery for the husband, at the beginning of the relation everything was clear between then, but then she changed, she became ‘sneaky’ when trying to hide her secrets. That also makes her a dynamic character. Edgar Allan Poe’s describes several characters in his narration. Minister D is the one who steals the letter from the French Queen so he can achieve his political goals. The Prefect, Monsieur G is a character who is afraid of publicity, particularly in this case. He is a meticulous investigator, who puts all his effort to find the purloined letter. Dubin is a character that has a rational thinking; he is the detective who finds the letter. All these characters are static.

The story is place on 19th century British society, time when there were a lot of American states with anti-miscegenation laws. Eiffel express that she “cut myself off from my race in order