"Why There Are No Garridebs"

This month's column may come as something of a shock to faithful readers of Plugs & Dottles. P&D has been a leading voice in the Sherlockian world's search for a living Garrideb, a bearer of that so-very-rare surname from "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs." Time and again, welve come close. A name in a phone directory. A birth announcement in a newspaper. But every lead was as phony as Piltdown man, and our hopes were shattered again and again.

After all this time, I had hoped that a search for a Garrideb would come to a satisfying conclusion, one last cry of "Eurekal" that would make our poor hearts jump. But I fear it is not to be.

There are no Garridebs alive today. I'm sure of it.

Why? Well, let me tell you how I stumbled on this bit of inevitable hypothesis. Instead of tracking a Garrideb in the present day, I thought I would follow one into the past. I would track down the original Garrideb through the roots of his name. If he were of Roman origin, his name would have taken its roots from the Latin words garrio, meaning "to chatter," and debeo, meaning "to owe." Put them together and you get . . . nothing that makes an sense to me. My trusty Chamber's Etymological English Dictionary failed to turn any 1ikely root words, and in desperation I turned to my copy of What Shall We Name The Baby? (Strictly for research, you understand.)

In the baby book "Garri" seemed to denote a spear in names of Teutonic origin. "Deb" is only found in "Deborah," a Hebrew name meaning "the bee."

A Hebrew Teuton seemed a little odd, but the phrase "spear the bee" intrigued me. The symbolism in it practically knocks you in the head. Not long after 1902, the year in which 3GAR takes place, Sherlock Holmes retired to keep bees on a little farm in Sussex. "Spear the Bee" sounds very much like a code name for "Kill Sherlock Holmes."

So let's look at this story again under this new light. A man called Nathan "Kill-Sherlock-Holmes" shows up at 221B Baker Street with an intriguing little case. Sherlockian scholars have often remarked how similar the Garrideb case is to REDH, and with good reason. I think Nathan "Kill-Sherlock-Holmes" had read REDH and based his story on it. He changed the trappings just enough to make it look different, but he could rest assured that Holmes would solve the case, just as he did in REDH, and that Holmes would take much the same action he took in that story.

In REDH, Sherlock Holmes waited until 10:00 PM to begin setting up his ambush for the bank robbers. Nathan "Kill-Sherlock-Holmes" quite foolishly assumed Holmes would wait for nightfall to set his trap. His assassin, Killer Evans, headed over to the place of the ambush at about 5:00 to crawl down under his sliding floorboards and wait for Holmes to show up. Unfortunately for the killers, this time Holmes didn't wait until 10:00.

Holmes got there at 4:00 in the afternoon. When Killer Evans showed up and started to hide, both Holmes and Watson were on him, just as if the case had been genuine. Even that barely stopped Evans from his mission as he whipped out his gun and tried to finish Holmes and Watson after all. Failing that, and captured as well, Evans stuck to his cover story about the forger's press so as to cover his partner's tracks.

It is a plan of which Professor Moriarty would have been proud. In fact, in looking at the whole plot, what sort of man had the resources to hire a completely loyal American assassin and stash a counterfeiter's press and bad bills? Obviously, the latter were the remains of an operation that didn't pan out. I bet Prescott's phonies were actually pretty shabby, a clue that would eventually lead Holmes to the truth. The whole matter smacks of an heir to the Moriarty criminal genius and connections, and the fact that Holmes did live to see retirement suggests the detective did find that heir.

Nathan Garrideb was every bit as fictitious as Howard Garrideb or Alexander Hamilton Garrideb, a mere ruse in a murder plot. The final score must read: Sherlock Holmes 1, Garridebs- 0.

Sorry, folks.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, June 1991)