For some reason I thought that Black Peter was another name for the devil, but I might have been thinking of the goat at the end of the movie The Witch called Black Phillip. Or maybe I was confused with Zwarte Piet, even though he is one of Santa’s helpers and supposed to be a good guy.
In any event, this Black Peter is a bit of a devil, being the brutish former master of a whale ship who is found stuck by a harpoon to the wall of his little hut. That’s a big clue right there, as Holmes begins the story at a butcher shop, trying to transfix a dead pig with a spear and learning that this is not an easy thing to do. Whoever killed Black Peter had some muscle. Black Pete’s real name, by the way, is Peter Carey, which put me off balance since that’s also the name of a celebrated Australian writer. I see the name “Peter Carey” and I think of the author. Can’t be helped.
The story here follows the usual series of steps, including the apprehension of an innocent man who Holmes has to clear. The killer is caught at the end using the same handcuff trick as is used on Jefferson Hope in A Study in Scarlet, and he’s a similarly sympathetic figure though I don’t know how far his plea of self-defence will take him in court.
The back story is too involved to be able to follow, and from what I’ve been able to gather it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in terms of the treatment of financial securities, but overall this is a lively adventure that fans probably appreciated. My favourite part is the lead-in, where Watson talks about the “memorable year ‘95” and its “curious and incongruous succession of cases.” These introductory passages get picked apart by Holmes aficionados because sometimes they include references to previous cases and sometimes they just remain teasing little clues to stories that Watson never wrote up. In the latter category we have to put the case of “Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer.” I wonder what that was all about. Apparently his arrest “removed a plague-spot from the East End of London.” Experts still debate over what Wilson was up to, and whether “canary” even refers to the bird of that name or instead has the slang meaning of a stool-pigeon or refers to something else entirely.
