Four Max Carrados Detective Stories

A fictitious blind investigator named Max Carrados appears in Ernest Bramah’s 1914 collection of mystery stories and books, Four Max Carrados Detective Stories. In the Strand Magazine, the four Max Carrados detective stories coexisted with the Sherlock Holmes adventures. The Carrados stories routinely outsold the Holmes stories at the time, even though they didn’t have the same length. Bramah was frequently billed above Arthur Conan Doyle. Max Carrados and The Eyes of Max Carrados, according to George Orwell, “are the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading,” together with those of Doyle and R. Austin Freeman. In the first narrative, “The Coin of Dionysius,” Max Carrados and his regular sidekick Mr. Carlyle’s personalities are described. Private investigator Mr. Carlyle oversees a business that focuses primarily on divorce and defalcation. For an expert opinion on a tetradrachm of Dionysius the Elder of Sicily that he suspects may have been a counterfeit put into a famous collection during a theft, he is led to Wynn Carrados’ residence at The Turrets in Richmond, London. When they first meet, the blind Carrados quickly recognizes Mr. Carlyle as Louis Calling, a former classmate from St. Michael’s.