Ernest Bramah

• Born: March 20, 1868
• Birthplace: Manchester, Lancashire, England
• Died: June 27, 1942
• Place of death: Somerset, England

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Max Carrados, 1914-1934

Contribution

In Max Carrados, Ernest Bramah created the first blind fictional detective, ushering in a host of blind, paralyzed, overweight, and otherwise disabled sleuths. Unlike many of those who followed him, however, Carrados is not truly disabled by his physical limitations. Because he has developed his other senses so acutely, his lack of sight is no real hindrance to him, and he gently mocks his sighted colleagues who are so often misled by what they see. Carrados’s blindness opens up new avenues to the writer. Because Carrados cannot see, Bramah is forced to come up with different ways by which evidence is gathered and examined, giving a fresh angle to conventional material.

Nevertheless, Bramah’s detective is not defined solely in terms of his blindness. A very kind man, he has a remarkable wit, demonstrated most memorably in his exchanges with Louis Carlyle, and a rigorous sense of justice, which at one point compels him to urge a murderer to commit suicide. Modern readers of Bramah may not find much that is new in terms of plot, but they will find much to appreciate in the strong characterizations and humor of the stories.

Biography

Very little is known about Ernest Bramah’s life, and it was his lifelong wish that it be so. Throughout his professional life, he demonstrated a remarkable skill at avoiding personal interviews, preferring to keep his private life private. His publisher was compelled in a 1923 introduction to assert that, in fact, Ernest Bramah was a real person and not a pseudonym for another author.

He was born Ernest Bramah Smith in Manchester, England, and most sources give the date as either 1868 or 1869. From his autobiographical first book, English Farming and Why I Turned It Up (1894), it can be learned that he dropped out of high school to try his hand at farming. It was not a success. Bramah subsequently turned to journalism and became a correspondent for a small newspaper. Later, in London, he became secretary to the publisher Jerome K. Jerome and eventually joined the editorial staff of Jerome’s periodical, To-day. Bramah left To-day to become editor of a new trade magazine for clergymen, The Minister, and stayed there until the magazine folded.

It was at this point that he became a full-time writer for magazines, creating the Max Carrados and Kai Lung stories that were later published in book-length collections. Bramah’s first book of detective fiction, Max Carrados, was published in 1914, when he was in his mid-forties; his only Max Carrados novel, The Bravo of London (1934), appeared when he was in his mid-sixties.

In addition to his writing, Bramah had a great interest in numismatics (an interest shared with Max Carrados), and he is the author of a nonfictional book on British coins, A Guide to the Varieties and Rarity of English Regal Copper Coins: Charles II-Victoria, 1671-1860 (1929).

Bramah’s Kai Lung stories, and some of his popular articles, deal so convincingly with Asian geography and culture that it has often been speculated that he lived for a time in Asia. That may in fact be true, but there is no evidence to support it. A small and thin man, Bramah lived as a recluse in his later life. He died in Somerset on June 27, 1942.

Analysis

In Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados stories, the reader finds the best of two worlds: The stories contain many of the conventional crimes and criminals that are greeted as old friends by those who have read widely in mystery and detective fiction, yet they center on a detective who is utterly new and who insistently provides a fresh view of the conventional material.

Max Carrados

Max Carrados was blinded as an adult, when a twig hit his eyes during a riding accident. The injury left him sightless, but the appearance of his eyes is unchanged. In his introduction to The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923), Bramah explains that

so far from that crippling his interests in life or his energies, it has merely impelled him to develop those senses which in most of us lie half dormant and practically unused. Thus you will understand that while he may be at a disadvantage when you are at an advantage, he is at an advantage when you are at a disadvantage.

Carrados, understandably, prefers to work when he is at an advantage; thus he conducts many of his investigations at night, and he manages to hold a roomful of villains at bay simply by extinguishing the lights. Even in a well-lit room, however, Carrados is able to perform remarkable feats: He is able to read newspaper headlines, playing cards, and photographic negatives by running his extremely sensitive fingers over them; by knowing what to look for and guessing where to search, he can locate a single petal on the ground or a few strands of hair caught in a bramble; he can recognize the voice or pattern of footsteps of a person he has not encountered in several years; and he is able, by identifying the odor of the adhesive, to determine that a man is wearing a false mustache.

Though Carrados’s achievements may seem to readers incredible and superhuman, Bramah went to some pains in his introduction to The Eyes of Max Carrados to establish that, historically, blind people have indeed accomplished much, and Carrados is only one example of the tremendous capabilities of the blind. “Although for convenience the qualities of more than one blind prototype may have been collected within a single frame,” each of the things that Carrados can do is certainly possible. “Carrados’s opening exploit, that of accurately deciding an antique coin to be a forgery, by the sense of touch, is far from being unprecedented.”

Carrados is not above feigning helplessness when it will help him obtain information. When it suits him, he can be remarkably clumsy, knocking over a framed picture (and stealing the piece of glass with the fingerprint on it), accidentally opening the door to a darkroom (to confront the suspect within), or bumping into furniture (so he can whisper to the accomplice who reaches out to help him). These accidents are typically followed by Carrados’s humble apology—“’sorry’, he shrugs, ’but I am blind.’”

With one exception, the rather unsuccessful novel The Bravo of London, Max Carrados solves his mysteries within the span of the short story. Yet even within this genre Bramah manages to establish characters that live and breathe and intrigue the reader. Bramah’s recurring characters—Carrados, Louis Carlyle, Parkinson, Inspector Beedle—are so engaging in part because they are revealed to be flawed. Witty, kindly, and generous as Carrados is, he also has a cold streak and is not immune to vanity. Previous to his reunion with Carrados, Carlyle has been disbarred because of an indiscretion (although not a crime), and he does not take cases from clients who cannot pay. In only a few sentences, Bramah presents a succinct and rather appealing suggestion of Inspector Beedle’s character:

the inspector nodded and contributed a weighty monosyllable of sympathetic agreement. The most prosaic of men in the pursuit of his ordinary duties, it nevertheless subtly appealed to some half-dormant streak of vanity to have his profession taken romantically when there was no serious work on hand.

Bramah’s crime fighters are believable, likable characters, not overly virtuous supermen.

This passage also shows something of Bramah’s own style. The sentences are economical and carry a constant faint touch of irony. “This is how people are,” Bramah seems to say, “and is it not amusing?” The teasing is always gentle, always affectionate—Bramah enjoys his characters, finds pleasure in the silliness of social climbing and the vagaries of human relationships, and laughs at human weakness rather than denying it.

As in this passage, with its reference to the inspector’s “weighty monosyllable,” most of the action in the stories is revealed through dialogue. Although the narrator is a third-person omniscient one, little is revealed that is not spoken aloud by one character to another. The reader may know that Carrados intends to conduct a search but will not learn what is found until Carrados tells someone else. Carrados likes to work alone, and not even the reader is allowed into his confidence until he is ready to reveal all. Even when the detective expresses dissatisfaction with himself, he does so by muttering to himself; the reader is permitted to overhear the muttering but not to enter into Carrados’s mind. Does he ever feel fear in a dangerous spot or have fits of self-pity about his blindness? The reader never knows any more than the other characters in the stories know.

Certainly one of Carrados’s most attractive characteristics is his ironic wit. Exchanges between Carrados and Carlyle are filled with sarcasm and affectionate teasing, but the blind man is at his best when sparring with criminals:

“If you happen to come through this alive and are interested you might ask Zinghi to show you a target of mine that he keeps. Seven shots at twenty yards, the target indicated by four watches, none of them so loud as the one [your friend is] wearing. . . .”

“I wear no watch,” muttered Dompierre, expressing his thought aloud.

“No, Monsieur Dompierre, but you wear a heart, and that not on your sleeve,” said Carrados. “Just now it is quite as loud as Mr. Montmorency’s watch. It is more central too—I shall not have to allow any margin. . . .”

“Monsieur,” declared Dompierre earnestly. . . . “Take care: killing is a dangerous game.”

“For you—not for me,” was the bland rejoinder. “If you kill me you will be hanged for it. If I kill you I shall be honourably acquitted. You can imagine the scene—the sympathetic court—the recital of your villainies—the story of my indignities. Then with stumbling feet and groping hands the helpless blind man is led forward to give evidence. Sensation!”

Bramah’s Criminals

If Max Carrados and his friends are made to resemble flesh-and-blood men, the same cannot be said for Bramah’s criminals. Even in Bramah’s time, his evildoers would have been familiar to anyone widely read in mystery fiction: They are mysterious strangers from India, Christian Scientists, philandering husbands, mad scientists, and Jews, and they are usually painted rather flatly. As a group, they are unusually crafty and intelligent, but they are not—with a few exceptions—complex characters whom one could perhaps forgive or grudgingly admire. One exception to this rule is the professional thief, often with an international reputation, who has lived by his wits for years and is a proper intellectual match for Carrados. Still, even these characters begin to be recognizable as a type, the “internationally renowned criminal,” and are indistinguishable one from another.

Another exception to the flatly evil villain sometimes turns out not to be a villain at all, but a misunderstood hero. Once Carrados, in the midst of obtaining definitive evidence against the “villain,” comes to understand the man’s true nature (and in Bramah’s stories, criminal masterminds are always male), he uses his wits to ensure that the crime-that-is-not-a-crime is carried through successfully, even while the police (whom he had called when he had arrest in mind) are on their way. It is in these stories that readers encounter another fascinating aspect of Carrados’s personality, and one of Bramah’s own fascinations with the business of solving crimes.

Crime Is Not a Game

The truth is, Bramah appears to believe, that solving a crime is not always as rewarding as one would suppose. Often, Carrados finds himself on the trail of someone whom he would rather not catch; he finds it distasteful at times to ruin careers or marriages or to waste the taxpayers’ money on preserving justice for evil men. At these times, he wishes that he had not become involved in the case. In fact, in many ways he is never truly involved, at least not emotionally. He is interested in solving the puzzle, not in bringing criminals to trial, and he prefers to let the police take over as soon as he can present the evidence to them. In the scenes in which Carrados agonizes over the consequences of his decision to take on a case, Bramah develops one of his recurring themes—the idea that crime is not simply a puzzle or a game, but something that really occurs, and with genuine human consequences. The theme is presented gently and in no way detracts from one’s pleasure in reading the stories; Bramah is writing mystery fiction, not tracts. Nevertheless, he wants his readers to leave his stories with a better understanding of the capabilities of the blind and the realities of a crime-ridden world.

If Bramah’s plots have one shortcoming, it is one that modern readers will find more annoying than did his contemporaries. In some tales, the mystery is solved more through divine intervention than through the ingenuity of the detective. In one case, for example, a pair of enormously clever thieves who have made a reputation on two continents escape with a large fortune. As they are almost away, with virtually no chance of being caught, they are suddenly confronted with the notion of God’s goodness and their own sinfulness. They repent and bring the money back. Though writers as great as William Shakespeare have found it necessary to include coincidence in their plots because coincidence is, in fact, a part of life, mystery stories that are resolved in this way tend to be rather unsatisfying.

The most satisfying resolutions are Carrados’s alone, and the special twist that clicks everything into place usually occurs offstage, in Carrados’s mind or in the course of one of his secret investigations. These are not mysteries that readers could solve if only they were clever enough—unless they happened to be experts on Greek tetradrachms (like Bramah and Carrados) or on local British history. The fun is in watching how Carrados does it, not in trying to beat him to the solution.

At his best, though, Bramah is a master of the short story in which everything fits, nothing is wasted, evil men get their due, and damsels in distress are rescued—all in a highly entertaining fashion.

Principal Series Characters:

• Max Carrados , a wealthy bachelor and amateur detective, around thirty-five, is totally blind. His blindness has led him to develop other senses, and he is able to read newspaper headlines by running his sensitive fingers over them, to monitor scents and sounds undetectable by others, and even to sense subtle changes in temperature.
• Louis Carlyle , a private-inquiry agent and disbarred solicitor, who calls for Carrados’s aid when he is stumped or when he has a client who cannot afford to pay. Very intelligent and capable, he requires assistance only on truly baffling cases.
• Parkinson is servant and eyes to Carrados. Extraordinarily observant, he is able to remember every detail of his surroundings, even to the size of a glove lying on a table four weeks before. He is the ideal detective’s assistant, asking no questions, following orders to the letter, revealing nothing.

Bibliography

Bleiler, E. F. Introduction to Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, by Ernest Bramah. New York: Dover, 1972. Surveys Bramah’s Max Carrados series and discusses the features that make its best entries stand out.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Reads Bramah as emerging from and, to some extent, continuing the Edwardian tradition in detective fiction.

Penzler, Otto. “Collecting Mystery Fiction: Max Carrados.” The Armchair Detective 16 (1983): 122-124. The editor of The Armchair Detective discusses the Max Carrados series and its worthiness to be considered for addition to one’s personal collection.

White, William. “Ernest Bramah: A First Checklist.” Bulletin of Bibliography 20, no. 6 (1958): 127-131. A bibliography of Bramah’s earlier work.

White, William. “Ernest Bramah in Anthologies, 1914-1972.” The Armchair Detective 10 (1977): 30-32. A bibliography that lists Bramah’s shorter works that have appeared in anthologies.

White, William. “Ernest Bramah in Periodicals, 1890-1972.” Bulletin of Bibliography 32 (January/March, 1975): 33-34, 44. A listing of Bramah’s works that appeared in periodicals over his career.