"IT WAS in the year ’95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns, and it was during this time that the small but instructive adventure which I am about to relate befell us."
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DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
HILTON SOAMES, tutor and lecturer in Greek at St. Luke’s College.
BANNISTER, servant of Soames and former butler to Jabez Gilchrist.
DAULAT RAS, an Indian. One of the three students.
GILCHRIST, an athletic student.
JABEZ GILCHREST, his father who ruined himself at the turf.
MILES MCLAREN, a brilliant but dissipated student.
SUMMARY:
Holmes is doing research in English charters at a “University town.” Soames comes in and begs him to aid in solving a mystery: someone has copied part of an examination for the Fortescue scholarship. It was obviously one of the three students who occupy the same building as Soames. Holmes solves the mystery.Gilchrist was the guilty party. Bannister had known young Gilchrist when he buttled for his father before his downfall and tried to shield him.Young Gilchrist leaves immediately and goes to join the Rhodesian police.
OTHER ADVENTURES MENTIONED
None.
DISGUISES
None
UNUSUAL DEDUCTIONS & bits
- Watson gives very few details about which town is involved in order to avoid a scandal.
- Several small conical pieces of earth are found and Holmes deduces that they fell from between the spikes of a pair of running shoes.
- The examination was to translate half a chapter of Thucydides.
- Was the school Oxford or Cambridge? Sherlockian scholars have long debated the issue with no clear evidence for either.
Official Abbreviation: 3STU.
The Adventure Of The Three Students was first published in the Strand Magazine, June 1904
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