The Adventure of the Three Garridebs – Class 11 English Chapter 4 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), a medical practitioner, is famous for his detective stories. His creations — the detective Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler Dr Watson — are known across the world. Collections include The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The stories combine suspense, excitement and humour with "keen, analytical intelligence" and "a deep human appeal". This is a story of incident, narrated by Watson.

Summary

The strange name (late June 1902)

Holmes shows Watson a letter from Nathan Garrideb of 136 Little Ryder Street. Soon the American lawyer John Garrideb, "Counsellor at Law" from Moorville, Kansas, arrives. Holmes notes his coat and boots are English — he has clearly been in England a long time. John is angry that Nathan called in a detective.

The American's tale

John says Alexander Hamilton Garrideb, a Kansas millionaire proud of his odd name, left a will dividing his land into three parts: John gets one if he finds two more adult male Garridebs to share the rest — "five million dollars for each". He found Nathan in the London telephone directory and now needs a third.

Holmes's suspicions

Holmes privately calls it "a rigmarole of lies": the coat frayed with a year's wear, no advertisements in the agony columns (which Holmes reads closely), and no "Dr Lysander Starr of Topeka" — a name Holmes invented to test him.

Nathan Garrideb's museum

Nathan is a tall, gaunt, bald, "cadaverous" collector in his sixties who almost never leaves his room, which is full of fossils, coins, butterflies and skulls. He dreams of becoming "the Hans Sloane of my age".

The advertisement and the trip to Birmingham

John bursts in with a newspaper advertisement for Howard Garrideb, Constructor of Agricultural Machinery, of Aston, Birmingham, and urges Nathan to travel there next day. Holmes notices the ad's American flavour: "plows" (not ploughs), "buck-boards", "artesian wells" — "bad English but good American". The lawyer clearly wrote it himself to get Nathan out of the room.

Killer Evans

At Scotland Yard's Rogues' Gallery Holmes identifies "John Garrideb" as James Winter, alias Morecroft, alias Killer Evans of Chicago — he shot three men in the States, came to London in 1893, and in 1895 shot Rodger Presbury, a famous forger and coiner, in a night club. The previous tenant of Nathan's rooms, "Waldron", matched Presbury's description.

The climax

Holmes and Watson hide behind a cupboard. Evans enters, rolls back the carpet, opens a trapdoor and goes down. When he re-emerges and sees two pistols, he fires — Watson is wounded in the thigh. Holmes knocks him down and, for once, reveals deep feeling: "You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" Watson says it was "worth a wound… to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask."

The resolution

The cellar holds Presbury's counterfeiting press and bundles of forged notes. Evans is arrested. Scotland Yard is delighted, but "an unappreciative Bench" sends Evans back to prison. Poor Nathan "never got over the shock of his dissipated dreams" and ends up in a nursing home in Brixton.

Characters

Themes

Literary Devices & Style

Word Power

Exam Focus

English clothes worn for a year; no agony-column adverts; didn't know the fake "Dr Lysander Starr"; American spelling and terms in the ad (plows, buck-boards, artesian wells).

To get the stay-at-home Nathan out of the room so he could reach Presbury's hidden counterfeiting outfit beneath the floor.

Holmes's rare show of emotion reveals deep friendship and loyalty under his cold exterior.

Language work: American vs British spellings — plow/plough, color/colour, center/centre, program/programme, check/cheque.

Common Mistakes