Just as the classic novelist wants to make his hero or heroine differ in character or circumstance from all previous ones, so the writer of detective tales feels obliged to make his investigator in some way singular. The demand leads to some dreadful temptations, one of which is to make the detective a blind man. Ernest Bramah was so tempted, but unlike others, who have variously gone in for bumblers, drunkards, paraplegics, and certifiable idiots, he achieved an unquestioned triumph in Max Carrados. This able and amiable man of otherwise independent means is but little dependent on help for the remarkable things he does, and these are not more than can be done without eyesight—let doubters read the authoritative work by T. D. Cutsforth on The Blind in School and Society.

The present volume [Max Carrados] inaugurated in 1914 the series of twenty-six cases in which Carrados and his friend, the inquiry agent Louis Carlyle, prevent or help avenge crime. The situations range from the serious to the comic without disturbing either the poise of the blind man or the slightly raffish tone of his associate. Throughout their adventures the reader will also enjoy the note of quiet derision which is typical of the writer who, besides Carrados, created Kai Lung and his pseudo-Chinese predicaments. It is perhaps this satirical attitude that makes the Carrados stories sound so fresh, though they were written more than half a century ago and are concerned with matters of daily life one tends to think vastly changed.

The test of this classic quality is best seen in "The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage", where the mood is still felt as tragic—and the pebbles rattling on the window pane as a master touch. The broader effects, at once alarming and farcical, in "The Comedy at Fountain Cottage" and "Harry the Actor" are equally memorable and credible, as is the very modern motive for the railway disaster.

Ernest Bramah tried only once to use his blind man in a full-length book, The Bravo of London (1934). It turned out an unconvincing thriller. For a writer who had so much humor and so wide a choice of interests—he once wrote a book on English farming and another on rare coins—he seems to have made few acquaintances among his contemporaries and left no perceptible mark as a person. The chief first-hand account of him is a brief passage in Grant Richards' Author Hunting, where in successive editions may be found two different photos of the elusive man who in real life was, appropriately enough, E. B. Smith.