BRAMAH, Ernest. The Eyes of Max Carrados. London: Grant Richards. 1923.
8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in dark blue to front and spine, with scarce original dustwrapper; pp. 319, [1]; wrapper dulled to spine with skilful repairs to edge and spine, a little spotting mainly to bottom edges, very good
First edition, first impression.
This is Bramah's second collection of stories about Max Carrados, a blind detective who solves his cases through the remarkable heightening of his remaining senses. He is capable, for instance, of reading newspaper print with his fingertips. He also has a sighted assistant, Parkinson, who provides visual evidence to back up Carrados's incredible deductions. The title of the collection is wonderfully suggestive, not only of Carrados's loss of sight but also of the surrogate "eyes" that compensate for it.
As with all of Bramah's work, the nine stories in the collection are ingenious, elegant and witty, each one allowing Carrados to show his sensory genius in a new but equally belief-defying manner. They were highly popular - issues of the Strand magazine featuring Carrados stories regularly outsold those containing Sherlock Holmes - and according to George Orwell, they "are the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading" along with those of Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman (Review of Penguin Books, New English Weekly, March 1936).
SKU: 2122682