Max Carrados

Max Carrados is a gentleman detective who was blinded in an accident and is better at the work than any man with eyes — he reads newsprint with his fingertips and hears what a room is doing. Bramah was so private that publishers doubted he existed; he refused photographs and left almost no record. These 1914 stories were outselling Conan Doyle in the magazines at the time, and the blindness is never a gimmick. Sixty plates of quiet interiors and low-toned portraits by Hammershøi and Whistler run alongside these stories of a detective who works in the dark.