The Adventure of Black Peter

Holmes helps Stanley Hopkins investigate the bizarre, violent demise of Captain Peter Carey at the point of a harpoon.

Dr. Watson's account of the strange death of Captain Peter Carey begins one morning with Holmes returning to Baker Street with a "huge barbed-headed spear tucked like an umbrella under his arm." The instrument, the facts unfold, duplicates the weapon which has been driven so violently through the victim's body that it has been discovered pinned to the wall like an insect.

Holmes helps Stanley Hopkins investigate the bizarre, violent demise of Captain Peter Carey at the point of a harpoon.

Dr. Watson's account of the strange death of Captain Peter Carey begins one morning with Holmes returning to Baker Street with a "huge barbed-headed spear tucked like an umbrella under his arm." The instrument, the facts unfold, duplicates the weapon which has been driven so violently through the victim's body that it has been discovered pinned to the wall like an insect.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was both a doctor and a believer in spirits, which may partly explain why his Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's most beloved detectives: Holmes always approaches his cases with the gentility and logic of a scientist, but the stories are suffused with an aura of the supernatural. Narrated by devoted assistant Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's adventures were so addictive that fans protested the master deducer's "death" in 1893 and Doyle had to resurrect him.