The Adventure of Black Peter

"The Adventure of Black Peter"
Peter Carey and Patrick Cairns, 1904 illustration by Sidney Paget
Author	Arthur Conan Doyle
Series	The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Publication date	1904

"The Adventure of Black Peter" is a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle. This tale is in the collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes, but was published originally in 1904 in the Strand Magazine and Collier's.

Forest Row in the Weald is the scene of a harpoon murder, and a young police inspector, Stanley Hopkins, asks Holmes, whom he admires, for help. Holmes has already determined that it would take a great deal of strength and skill to run a man through with a harpoon and embed it in the wall behind him.

Peter Carey, the 50-year-old victim and former master of the Sea Unicorn of Dundee, was a very unpleasant man, especially when he was drunk. He also had a reputation for being violent, even having been prosecuted once for assaulting the local vicar. Perhaps not surprising, his daughter is actually glad that he is dead. She and her mother have endured years of abuse from the old whaler and sealer, who moreover had some remarkably peculiar habits. For instance, he did not sleep in the family house, but in a cottage that he built some distance from the house, the interior of which he had decorated to look like a sailor’s cabin on a ship. This is where he was found harpooned. Hopkins could find no footprints or other physical evidence. A tobacco pouch was, however, found at the scene, made of sealskin and with the initials "P. C.", and also full of strong ship’s tobacco. This is curious, as Peter Carey — or "Black Peter" as people called him — seldom smoked. Indeed, Hopkins found no pipe in the cabin.

The only clue from an eyewitness comes from a stonemason named Slater, who says that he saw the shadow of a head on the blind in one of Carey’s cabin windows, and he is sure that it was not Carey. The next day, Carey was in his foulest mood, and then early the next morning, at about two o’clock, his daughter heard a scream from the direction of the cabin, but took no notice, as Carey often screamed when he was drunk. The murder was not discovered until about midday, when the ladies summoned enough courage to look in on him. Hopkins was soon on the scene.