7.2 The Text

The full story is in your NCERT Poorvi textbook. This page gives an original summary and explanation — read the story itself first, then use these notes (and try the puzzle yourself!).

Summary

In the town of Idaville, Chief Brown, the Chief of Police, often shares his hardest cases with his clever son, Encyclopedia Brown. One such case concerns a jewellery robbery committed five years earlier at the Diamond Mart, where about a million dollars’ worth of jewels was stolen by two masked men. The police suspected Tim Nolan and his partner Daniel Davenport, but the jewels were never found, and Davenport disappeared.

Now Nolan has died of a stroke, leaving behind a puzzling message — four strange words, with an obvious blank where a fifth word should be. The police cannot make sense of it. Encyclopedia studies the four odd words and suddenly sees the pattern: each one is hidden inside the name of a day of the week. When he works out the missing fifth word, it points to the hiding place of the stolen jewels — buried under a young fir tree growing in a twenty-gallon jug of earth in Nolan’s plant nursery.

The fifth-word puzzle

Here is the secret Encyclopedia spotted. Nolan took each weekday, removed the letters D, A, Y, and rearranged the letters that were left to make a word. The four words in his message were:

Day of the week	Remove D, A, Y	Letters left	Word formed
Monday	– D A Y	M, O, N	Nom
Tuesday	– D A Y	T, U, E, S	Utes
Wednesday	– D A Y	W, E, D, N, E, S	Sweden
Thursday	– D A Y	T, H, U, R, S	Hurts

The pattern is clearly the days of the week in order, so the missing fifth word must come from Friday. Remove D, A, Y from Friday and the letters left are F, R, I — which spell “Fir.”

That single word was Nolan’s hidden clue: the jewels were buried under a fir tree. Encyclopedia’s father then dug up the young fir in Nolan’s nursery and recovered the stolen jewellery.

Try This Cover the table above and test yourself: take Saturday, remove the letters D, A, Y, and rearrange what’s left. What word can you make? (Hint: you’ll have S, T, U, R… plus one more.)

Explanation: why this is good detective writing

The story plays fair with the reader. Every clue needed to solve it is on the page — the four words, the missing fifth, and the fact that Nolan ran a nursery full of plants. Encyclopedia wins not by special knowledge but by noticing a pattern and following it logically. The puzzle also has a neat double meaning: “Fir” sounds like “fur,” but it is really the name of a tree — exactly the kind of clever twist a mystery loves.

The Key Idea The whole case turns on one habit of mind: looking for the pattern behind a set of odd facts. Four strange words become a code the moment you ask, “What do these have in common?” That single question is the detective’s most powerful tool.