Ernest Bramah's blind detective Max Carrados "sees" more clearly than sighted Scotland Yard detectives. Having lost his sight, Carrados has developed his other senses to enable him to pick up on clues others miss.
This book of short stories, Max Carrado Mysteries, was published in 1927, fourteen years after Carrados made his debut in mystery fiction. Some of the abilities Carrados has developed after his accidental blinding, such as the ability to read newspaper headlines and handwritten words with his fingertips and his capacity for being able to pick a specific book off a shelf with unerring accuracy seem a bit far fetched, but Ernest Bramah apparently wrote an essay detailing cases where real blind people had developed each of the abilities he attributes to Carrados.
A bit more difficult to swallow is the occasional intervention of the supernatural into some of the stories, such as "The Strange Case of Cyril Bycourt", where an electric power plant built on top of a mass grave of plague victims influences the lives and health of several people. Still, the stories are entertaining and worth reading.
Grade: B.
I had forgotten that I had another book of Max Carrados short stories, Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, published by Dover in 1972. This book incorporates two of the stories from Max Carrados Mysteries, but it also contains earlier stories, including the first Max Carrados story, "The Coin of Dionysis", first published in 1914, which explains Carrados' name change, the accident that resulted in his blindness, and the relationship with Louis Carlyle, the inquiry agent who brings him difficult cases. I found most of these stories interesting and well worth reading, too.
Grade: B+
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