BAYNARD (HARDWICK) Kendrick (1894-1977) was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the Episcopal Academy in 1912. In 1914, he became the first American to join the Canadian Infantry, signing up one hour after World War I was declared; he served as a sergeant in England for the duration of the war.

During WWII, he instructed blind veterans, receiving a special plaque from General Omar Bradley to honor his work. Although fully sighted, he had a life-long interest in the blind and was one of the organizers of the Blinded Veterans Association, its only sighted advisor, and Honorary Chairman of its Board of Directors. After jobs with various companies in Florida, Philadelphia, and New York, he became a full-time writer in 1932 and settled in Florida.

Kendrick was one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America, bearing membership card #1, serving as its first president in 1945, and receiving its Grand Master Award in 1967.

While producing numerous short stories for the pulps, notably the series of fourteen stories about Miles Standish Rice that he wrote for the prestigious Black Mask, the most distinguished of all detective fiction magazines, he is remembered today for his novels about Captain Duncan Maclain, a blinded WWI veteran who becomes a private eye, assisted by his friend and partner, Spud Savage, but even more by his two dogs, Schnucke and Dreist.

The first Maclain novel, The Last Express (1937), was filmed by Universal in 1938 with Edward Arnold, who also starred in The Hidden Eye (1945), an original film script in which Maclain battles Nazi spies. The 1971-1972 television series Longstreet that starred James Franciscus as a blind detective, was based on the Maclain series.

“5-4=Murderer” was originally published in the January 1953 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

5-4=Murderer

By Baynard Kendrick

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF BLINDNESS, and twenty-one years as a private investigator, had driven home one unassailable truth to Captain Duncan Maclain. He lived in a world of blackness, but it was lighted with hearing, touch, taste, and smell. To disregard any notion conveyed to his mind by those four keen senses working together, no matter how foolish it seemed for the moment, was to court trouble, and sometimes to invite death . . .

It lacked five minutes of midnight when Maclain got out of the heavy truck that had picked him up hitch-hiking three miles away on 17-E, plodding carefully along with his left foot on the macadam and his right on the grassy shoulder. The friendly driver hadn’t guessed he was blind, but had felt Maclain’s urgency to reach a telephone.

“That’s Nick’s Diner over there.” People were always uselessly pointing out places to Duncan Maclain. “This is the junction of 303 and 17-E. I’d pull up closer but I bogged there once. You can’t put these trucks where you can put a car.”

“Thanks a million,” said Duncan Maclain.