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Laing, Patrick. Patrick Laing was created by “Patrick Laing,” the pseudonym of Amelia Reynolds Long (Steve Carter, Katherine Piper, Edward Trelawny), and appeared in six novels from 1945 to 1957, beginning with If I Should Murder.

Patrick Laing is a Disabled Detective. He is blind.

However, unlike some of the blind detectives who are occasionally encountered in fiction, he is capable of no phenomenal feats, such as reading newspaper print by the sense of touch, or other patent impossibilities. His reading is confined to Braille...and while he can go about the city alone...he prefers to be accompanied by a guide when visiting places with which he is unfamiliar.

But despite his blindness he is a fierce warrior against crime. He is a top criminologist and psychologist and is known for “his tireless and unending fight against the overstressing of circumstantial evidence by the prosecution in murder cases.” He also believes that

all persons, criminal and otherwise, invariably follow certain set patterns of individual behavior, which become established early in life; and that, as in the case of fingerprints, no two such individual behavior patters are ever identical. Therefore, if the behavior patterns of all persons associated with a particular crime are thoroughly studied by the investigator, no miscarriage of justice will be possible.

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