Review by Nick Fuller
5/5
The Blind Barber is superb farce rather than a good detective story. In fact, although there are many clues, there is very little detection; instead, the book concerns four lunatics, who, whenever they see the captain of the Queen Victoria, attack him — with whiskey-bottles, fly-spray or professional boxers. Throw in the sozzled antics of M. Fortinbras, the master puppeteer; a pair of aesthetes who would make Philo Vance quail; and a Norwegian captain who tells pointless anecdotes, and the result is a classic comedy. Yet amidst all the comedy, the detective story is not forgotten. Dr. Fell, who appears only in brief episodes at the beginning, middle and end, functions as armchair detective, pointing out sixteen wonderfully gnomic clues, which would enable the alert reader to work out who attacked an unknown woman outside the room of one of the daft heroes, and vanished while the zanni rushed off to clonk the captain over the head with a whiskey-bottle, leaving only a bloody razor and a blood-soaked mattress behind. The MacGuffin clues, both an emerald elephant and an incriminating film of "eminent soaks," are superbly handled, especially the elephant, which, like the money in The Punch and Judy Murders, is a brilliantly double-edged clue. The murderer's identity is a grand surprise, along the lines of GK Chesterton's "The Head of Caesar", a surprise that adds to the reader's delight, for, not only has he been tremendously entertained on every page, but he has been hoodwinked and led right up the garden path.