Best Max Carrados Detective Stories

Max Carrados

by Ernest Bramah

Ten tales relate the blind detective's adventures in Edwardian England

Genres: Mystery, Detective, Classics

245 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1972

About the author

Bramah was a reclusive soul, who shared few details of his private life with his reading public. His full name was Ernest Bramah Smith. It is known that he dropped out of Manchester Grammar School at the age of 16, after displaying poor aptitude as a student and thereafter went into farming, and began writing vignettes for the local newspaper. Bramah's father was a wealthy man who rose from factory hand to a very wealthy man in a short time, and who supported his son in his various career attempts.

Bramah went to Fleet Street after the farming failure and became a secretary to Jerome K. Jerome, rising to a position as editor of one of Jerome's magazines. At some point, he appears to have married Mattie.

More importantly, after being rejected by 8 publishers, the Wallet of Kai Lung was published in 1900, and to date, remains in print. Bramah wrote in different areas, including political science fiction, and mystery. He died at the age of 74. See http://www.ernestbramah.com for more information.

Reviews

[Bev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Max Carrados is a blind detective who owes his ability to solve mysteries to the honing of his other senses. He relies on his profound senses of hearing, smell, and touch to aid him in "seeing" what others miss. His abilities do tend towards the super-power side of things (especially his supposed ability to "read" print if it has made enough of an impression on the page and the font is large enough. But the stories are interesting enough and I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for them. As with all short story collections, the Best Max Carrados Detective Stories has a mixed bag of proficiency--giving the collection ★★★ for a mid-range rating. My favorites are "The Knight's Cross Signal Problem," "The Disappearance of Marie Severe," and "The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage."

A run-down of the stories:
"The Coin of Dionysius": This appears to be the first case in which Carlyle consults Carrados. He is relying on Carrados's knowledge of coins and special skills to help him determine if a rare coin is real or fake.
"The Knight's Cross Signal Problem": When a train accident occurs, the signalman swears that the signal showed red for danger and the engineer swears it was green for proceed. They are both right and Carrados proves how this can be.
"The Mystery of the Vanished Petition Crown": Another rare coin case. This time it disappears at auction and it looks like either a young female journalist or the attendant who showed her the coin must be the thief. Carrados, naturally, can "see" other options.
"The Holloway Flat Tragedy": Mr. Poleash comes to Carlyle with a story of a jealous lover of a shop girl he (Poleash) has flirted with and spurned when she pressed him for marriage. (He's married.) He's sure the man is out to get him. When Poleash is found dead, Carrados suspects a much deeper plot.
"The Disappearance of Marie Severe": Inspector Beedel asks for Carrados's help in the case of a missing schoolgirl. Carrados not only discovers the secret of the girl's whereabouts, but helps bring her family back together.
"The Mystery of the Poisoned Dish of Mushrooms": A young boy dies from poisoning. Did his uncle slip poisoned mushrooms into his food so he could inherit in the boy's place? Carrados doesn't believe the police are seeing the whole picture.
"The Ghost at Massingham Mansions": Instead of haunting a spooky old house, this ghost haunts a fairly new building of apartments. Its favorite occupations are turning on the gas lamps and running a bath. Carrados doesn't believe in ghosts--but who could be lighting the gas and running the water in an empty locked apartment?
"The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage": Lt. Hollyer is convinced that Mr. Creake married his sister for her money and asks Carrados for his help. The detective discovers a sinister plot to do away with Mrs. Creake and they must act fast to prevent it from being carried out.
"The Last Exploit of Harry the Actor": A mystery featuring the robbery from several safe deposit boxes in a Lucas Street depository known colloquially as "The Safe." To gain access, box holders must pass through several barriers--both real locks and bars as well as secret passwords known only to the owners. Carrados uses his extraordinary senses to quickly solve the puzzle.
"The Ingenious Mr. Spinola": Mr. Spinola is said to be a great mathematician and inventor. He has produced an automaton that can play rubicon piquet--and win with astonishing regularity. Is it a legitimate enterprise or an elaborate swindle? Or neither? Carrados can tell us.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting. Thanks.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable stories following an interesting conceit--a blind detective who "sees" far more clearly than those around him.

[James Hold · Rating 1 out of 5]

BEST MAX CARRADOS DETECTIVE STORIES by Ernest Bramah. OMG, where to begin? If these represent his 10 'best' stories then I pity the fool who reads the worst ones.

We start with 'The Coin of Dionysus' where Carlyle must determine if a coin if fake. He ends up going to Max, who is blind. Max licks the coin with his tongue and tells Carlyle a complete history of the coin and who is behind the forgery. Not a shred of evidence is offered. You just have to take his word for it.

Next is 'The Knight's Cross Signal Problem'. A train accident occurs. Both the driver and the signalman claim they are in the right. Max investigates. He finds a home that once rented a room to a man from India. He has his servant read him a notice on a billboard. We are not told what the notice says. Max summons the Indian to his room, confronts him with the crime (something to do with securities and embezzlement--again no evidence is presented) and the Indian confesses. The closest we get to an explanation of how it was done is that Max finds the Indian had a headlamp made from green glass. After that the reader is on his own to figure it out. Worse, Max allows the Indian to commit suicide rather than face the gallows. How this clears the driver and signalman I'll never know. At one point in the story Carlyle says to Max, 'I don't believe that you have treated me quite fairly.' Amen to that. If you withhold all information from the reader then you are definitely treating everyone unfair.

'The Holloway Flat Tragedy' starts well with Carlyle being visited by a client on whom a murder has been attempted, someone having stabbed his pillow and bedsheet while he was out. Several days later the murder is successful. Only then Max enters the picture and things come to a grinding halt. It turns out to be the usual deal of wife wants husband killed so she can be with her lover yada yada yada. Blind Max bumbles around the room and knocks a picture frame from the mantle, breaking the glass. Max at the end reveals he lifted a fingerprint from the glass. Why? Why not confiscate the frame intact? Why not dust it for prints right there? Wouldn't breaking it into pieces lessen the chance of finding prints? Who knows? But the capper--or crapper to be more accurate--comes in the final three paragraphs:

'But the great mistake--the vital oversight--the alarm signal to my perceptions--'
'Yes?'
'... The sheet and bolster-case that so convincingly turned up to clinch your client's tale once and for all demolished it. They had never been on Poleash's bed ... What a natural thing for a woman to take them from her own, and yet how fatal! I sensed that damning fact as soon as I had them in my hands...'

Did everyone get that? Max simply 'sensed' that it was wrong. It nicely dispenses with the need for evidence, or deductions, or actual proof if all you have to do is 'sense' the situation. It also helps the author if he doesn't have to come up with a logical explanation for things. Just throw anything against the wall, don't drop any hints for the reader to pick up on, and then 'sense' your conclusions.

I don't understand the appeal of this guy or how the editor could compare him to Holmes or Thorndyke, unless you mean he's another smug, insufferable twit with no redeeming qualities other than his 'eccentricities' are in someway supposed to strike us as charming.

Bottom line is Ernest Bramah spends so much time trying to be clever that he forgets to make sense. 'Bramah' is an apt name here because the stories are a lot of bull.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bramah was probably best known for his wonderful Kai Lung stories -- and for being a complete recluse. A man of diverse talents, he wrote compelling detective stories, hard-to-describe refined tales of oriental charm, humorous stories, and science fiction/supernatural tales. It was quite a range, and as far as I can tell, he was as accomplished in one genre as another.

The Max Carrados stories are in the "work with me on this one" vein: the central character is a blind detective. Unlike Sax Rohmer's blind "dream detective," Moris Klaw, however, there's no supernatural component to Carrados' skills. Instead, he relies purely on the refinement of his other senses and on brain power. What's striking about the tales is how believable Bramah makes his detective's ability to solve cases seem. Max Carrados is a compelling creation, the sort of fictional character you want to meet in real life.

This book is a trusty Dover editions -- three cheers for Dover Thrift Editions! -- with a succinct introduction by the omniscient (in matters of genre fiction) E.F. Bleiler.

Note to self: I should read a biography of Braham. I'm sure a good biography of him would be as sensational and intriguing as his mysteries.

[Googoogjoob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent; consistent; not spectacular. This volume collects 10 of the 26 Max Carrados stories, published from 1913 to 1927. There are two main things I'd note about these stories:

The first is that, of course, Max Carrados is notable for being the first blind detective of fiction. But, perhaps surprisingly, this is in practice barely relevant to most of the stories. Carrados's heightened senses of touch, hearing, and smell are occasionally useful in his investigations; but he's very well adapted to his condition, and when attention is called to his blindness, it's almost always because he's doing it strategically, to slyly disarm an antagonist, or to take advantage of their patronizing assumptions. His character is much more strongly defined by his phlegmaticism and wry humor than it is his blindness. This human, dignified treatment of disability is at odds at what one might expect when one hears "first blind detective."

The other is that Bramah clearly likes melodrama, to a much greater extent than most of his contemporaries. He likes dramatic or tragic climaxes and denouements. Scarcely ever does he allow a criminal go to prison as usual; he likes last-minute reconciliations and suicides and so forth. The puzzle nature of these stories is accordingly played down relative to the characters and drama, though they are still firmly in the mystery-puzzle form. Carrados is sometimes discussed as an early example or forebear of the Golden Age style; but Bramah's style, I think, has more in common with the melodramatic popular fiction of the late 19th century than with the more psychologically-inclined style of the great Golden Age writers.

[Ivonne Rovira · Rating 2 out of 5]

“All the same, Max, I don’t think that you have treated me quite fairly,” protested Carlyle, getting over his first surprise and passing to a sense of injury. “Here we are and I know nothing, absolutely nothing, of the whole affair.”
From “The Knight’s Cross Signal Problem”

That’s pretty much how readers will feel when reading the 10 short stories gathered in this re-release of a 1972 anthology of Ernest Bramah’s blind detective, Max Carrados. Braham spends nearly as much time is spent in each tale marveling at how the blind Carrados can “read” newspaper headlines by feeling the newsprint, know (due to his other senses) what people have in their pockets, and other impossible feats as he spends on the actual investigation. Author Bramah never plays fair with readers, providing them no more clues than he passes on to Carrados’ private detective pal Mr. Carlyle.

Bramah published his first Max Carrados book in 1914 and continued the stories into the 1930s. Inexplicably, these stories were pretty popular in their day, sometimes outselling Sherlock Holmes stories. However, modern audiences are likely to find Carrados disappointing since his revelations at the end of each short story seem to come out of nowhere. I give Bramah credit for being incredibly ahead of his time on both race and imperialism, but otherwise his descent into obscurity is entirely understandable.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book from NetGalley and Dover Publications in exchange for an honest review.

[Jc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Max Carrados is another worthy competitor for Mr. Sherlock Holmes crown as the Great Detective. I have run across the name before, but this was my first reading of any of Bramah’s stories. This selection is a fun sampling of the character and his methods – using his blindness to better detect, to better “see,” the truth of what transpired, reading characters and clues as well as Holmes himself, but without the benefit of sight. According to Wikipedia, George Orwell once wrote, “along with those of Doyle and R. Austin Freeman, [the best Max Carrados stories] are the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading."

[Elizabeth Upcott · Rating 2 out of 5]

A complete mixed bag. The concept is interesting, the mysteries have potential, and every now and again you get some fun dialogue; but more often than not the solutions feel obvious or out of nowhere, while the endings feel absurd or contrived.

[Jessi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The claim to fame of Max Carrados is that he is blind. Blind detective, it's been done but Max was one of the first. His adventures are somewhat interesting but some of the solutions seem like great leaps of logic. I enjoyed the first few stories in the book but then it got sort of... convoluted. Good example of the time period but maybe not my faves.

[Lee Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

These were not very good. The blind detective with superhuman powers was just too contrived and too clever by half. I read two stories and they just weren't very interesting.

[Andréa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note: I received a digital review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories" is a collection of 10 short mystery stories set in the early 20th century. These are clever, clue-based mysteries. The solutions aren't usually clear until Max explains it, though all the clues were available.

What makes Max Carrados unique is that he's blind, though he turns this into a strength rather than a weakness. He looks beyond the obvious and can perceive things that sighted people don't. He's also very well informed and so might consider a possibility that others wouldn't even know to consider. I enjoyed all of the stories, and I'd highly recommend this collection.

The included stories:
The Coin of Dionysius
The Knight's Cross Signal Problem
The Mystery of the Vanished Petition Crown
The Holloway Flat Tragedy
The Disappearance of Marie Severe
The Mystery of the Poisoned Dish of Mushrooms
The Ghost at Massingham Mansions
The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage
The Last Exploit of Harry the Actor
The Ingenious Mr. Spinola

I received an ebook review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.

[Laura Newsholme]

DNF