My guest emerging from the Classic Mysteries vault this week is one of the most unusual detectives in crime fiction. Max Carrados is blind - but that blindness, quite evidently, in no way deters him from seeing the correct facts of any case in which he becomes involved. Beginning in 1914, his creator, Ernest Bramah, wrote dozens of stories featuring Carrados, which were collected into several volumes. For a fine introductory look at some of Max Carrados's best cases, I suggest you consider an anthology of ten of those adventures in a volume published by Dover Publications called The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, chosen and introduced by E. F. Bleiler. I gave it an audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast nearly a decade ago. I hope you'll enjoy the text of the review - as usual, it has been slightly edited:
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Now here are a few interesting and puzzling problems for you.
There is a deadly train wreck – but the motorman of the doomed train insists that the signal he saw was green, not red.
A young girl disappears as she walks down her street to go to school.
A young boy dies of poison – but was it an accident or murder?
And who – or what – is haunting an empty apartment and causing the lights and water to go on and off?
There are several more of these problems in need of solving. But what really interests us here is the detective: an amateur, though police welcome his help, he proves to be quite an investigator – but with one definite difference: he is blind. It is a disability that Max Carrados turns into a positive attribute in The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, by Ernest Bramah.
During the early years of the 20th century, readers of detective stories were introduced to a variety of fascinating detectives. Many of them rivaled Sherlock Holmes in ingenuity – even in popularity, although few have had the kind of staying power that Holmes has demonstrated among readers.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to one of the more unusual detectives from those early years of the 20th century. His name is Max Carrados, created by Ernest Bramah – and he is blind. According to the first Max Carrados story, “The Coin of Dionysius,” Carrados suffers from a form of blindness called amaurosis. Although he cannot see with his eyes, his other senses have been trained and enhanced, so that he is able, for example, to read newspaper headlines through the sensitivity of his fingertips, which can feel the impressions of ink on paper. His hearing is phenomenal; his sense of scent and even of taste help him in his work. And, as he explains frequently, where others have their eyes to mislead them, he does not – and so he is that much harder to fool.
We come to Carrados through his friend, a private inquiry agent named Louis Carlyle. When the investigation calls for the police, Carrados works frequently with Inspector Beedel... Neither Carlyle nor Beedel is, by any means, the kind of not-very-intelligent observer we see in too many detective stories. Both men are quite intelligent – but, being sighted, they often miss the evidence of their other senses that will guide the unsighted Max Carrados in his investigations.
The first Max Carrados stories appeared in 1914. E. F. Bleiler, who wrote a brief introduction to one collection of these stories, says that 25 of the stories were published in three anthologies between 1914 and 1927. Not all the stories, as he says, are first-rate, but enough are so that any collection you find is very likely to include many of the really good stories.
Among the ones I have read in my various collections of these stories, I’d recommend several [ed. note - all available in the Bleiler collection].
“The Coin of Dionysius” tells how Louis Carlyle and Max Carrados came to meet each other – and how Carlyle responds to Max’s suggestion that Louis bring difficult cases to Carrados to be solved. The crime here is one of forgery; not all the mysteries deal with murder.
One that does is called “The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage,” in which a man is murdered in a particularly gruesome attack. The murderer seems to have left a fair number of clues, and it is only Carrados who discovers what really happened – primarily because he can NOT see those deliberately misleading clues...
I am particularly fond of “The Disappearance of Marie Severe,” in which Carrados is asked by the police to help try and find a missing schoolgirl. She left her house to walk the length of her street to school – and yet she never arrived. It is a sensational crime – with a startling solution.
There are many more – but there is one in particular I would call to your attention. It is called “The Ghost at Massingham Mansions.” Someone, or something, is putting on quite a show in an empty apartment, turning gaslights on or off just as observers come charging into the apartment – yet nobody is present. There is also evidence of the bath water in the apartment – water that has been turned off at its source – running into the bathtub even with the pipes apparently closed off. The solution to this particular problem is highly entertaining – and hinges to some degree on how difficult it is to employ the art of misdirection against a blind man.
There are a fair number of collections of the Max Carrados detective stories available in various editions, and all of the stories are available as well in collections for e-readers. For casual, entertaining reading, it’s hard to beat The Best Max Carrados Mysteries, by Ernest Bramah.
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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.
Next: Footsteps in the Dark, by Georgette Heyer.
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