3. Scouting Skills: Max Carrados, Sherlock Holmes’ Blind Rival

Sherlock Holmes reaches his conclusions primarily by visual observation, sometimes using a lens to supplement what he sees with the naked eye. But Holmes also has affinities with more basic instincts. Although one would never think of associating him with any form of outdoor exercise, in both ‘The Red-Headed League’ and ‘A Case of Identity’ he has a hunting-crop to hand, and on a number of occasions he demonstrates the kind of savage skills which degeneration theorists were increasingly recommending as an antidote to the supposedly emasculating effects of over-civilisation. Ideas about evolution and atavism also inform Ernest Bramah’s series of short stories about the blind detective Max Carrados. Carrados’ blindness might seem a classic instance of a deviation from the norm which confers no advantage but is in fact a positive disadvantage, and yet Carrados himself regards his blindness as his superpower in the same way as sight is Sherlock Holmes’, for since he cannot see he detects by the use of other senses, and his blindness also gives him greater spiritual insight. This chapter argues that Bramah’s stories acknowledge the primacy of the Holmesian method of visual detection but also draw attention to its underlying assumptions and implications.