Blindman’s Buff

Blindman’s Buff is an abduction plot built around false identities and a staged test of blindness: an impostor posing as the celebrated Duke of Blairgowrie lures Tommy into a room wired with an electrified floor, then expects him to die trying to escape. The trap is defeated when Tommy reveals that his eyeshade is false, turning the supposed game of chance into a contest of performance and observation. The episode brings the Beresfords’ theatrical detective methods into direct contact with lethal deception, and makes disguise—not merely a disguise of clothes or title, but the manipulation of what another person believes they can see—the story’s central mechanism.

The Blunt Performance and the Abduction

The encounter grows out of the identity Tommy has constructed as Mr. Blunt. At the International Detective Agency, the private office is arranged to project authority: an immense desk, carefully labelled files that are all empty, leather-seated chairs, and a telephone ready for rehearsed effects. Tommy sits behind the desk as a supposed veteran agency chief, while Tuppence works in the adjoining room and Albert plays the office boy. The elaborate appearance of a functioning detective business is a performance awaiting a client, and the false client who arrives exploits exactly that expectation.

At lunch, an older, well-dressed man with an eyeglass and small grey moustache approaches Tommy after being told that he is Mr. Theodore Blunt. Tommy confirms the identity. The stranger then presents an urgent case: his sixteen-year-old daughter has been abducted in unusual circumstances, he says, and he dares not call the police. He has come to the agency instead and insists that Tommy return with him immediately. The appeal is tailored to the role Tommy is playing: a supposed celebrated detective is offered a case that seems to require discretion and speed.

The client’s aristocratic identity proves as false as Tommy’s professional one. Once Tommy is under threat, the man identifies himself not as the Duke of Blairgowrie but as a ham merchant who has borrowed the Duke’s name because he expected that Tommy would not refuse a celebrated client. The abrupt change in voice accompanies the change in claimed identity. Earlier, the man known as Inspector Dymchurch had seemed a typical Englishman; now he speaks English perfectly with the manner and appearance of a well-educated foreigner. His associate Coggins is present as muscle, while Tommy is bound and gagged. The abrupt exposure of the imposture shows how readily an authoritative social identity can be manufactured—and how dangerous it is to accept a role’s appearance as proof.

A Trap Designed as a Game

The impostor turns Tommy’s own taste for sensational fiction into part of the threat. He says that Tommy’s and Tuppence’s performance that day proves their fondness for elaborate detective games, then presents his own invention as an ingenious game in return. The room’s metal floor has small projections scattered across its surface. A switch activates the electric current; stepping on one of the projections, the false Duke says, means death. Tommy is made to wear the eyeshade and told that reaching the door without stepping on a danger spot will bring freedom. He is then unbound and handed his cane, so that the apparent opportunity to escape becomes the instrument of a deliberately unequal test.

The mechanism depends on more than the current. The impostor has arranged Tommy’s supposed blindness so that he cannot distinguish safe floor from lethal projections, while the man who set the trap can watch him stumble. The offered choice—walk to the door or die—conceals the fact that the captor has already decided the likely outcome. The scene’s title, Blindman’s Buff, names the cruel parody: a familiar game of finding one’s way blindfolded becomes an execution devised for the amusement of the person who controls the room.

Tommy answers the imposed darkness with light. He touches a match to something he is holding and throws it onto the table; a blinding glare fills the room. The flash makes the impostor blink and lower his pistol hand, interrupting his control of the scene. Tommy then explains that the eyeshade is a fake: he can see perfectly. He had intended to deceive Tuppence during lunch by pretending to be blind, first making mistakes and then displaying impressive abilities, but he never trusted the stranger to let him survive a fair attempt to cross the floor. His apparent disability was another layer of the performance, not the limitation the trapper believed it to be.

The Trap Reversed

The impostor’s plan fails when his own anger overrides his caution. As Tommy warns him to be careful, the man springs forward in fury without watching where he places his feet. A blue crackle of flame flashes across the room; he sways and falls. The sharp smell of singed flesh mingles with ozone, making the trap’s electrical violence unmistakable. Tommy’s reversal depends on the captor’s confidence: the man expects a blind prisoner to be helpless, but his own movement across the same dangerous floor exposes him to the mechanism he has activated.

The scene therefore hinges on the difference between claimed and actual sight. The false Duke treats Tommy’s eyeshade as conclusive evidence that he cannot see, just as Tommy’s assumed title and office have helped make him appear to be the detective the stranger expects. Yet both performances are unstable. Tommy’s concealed sight gives him a decisive advantage, and the impostor’s fabricated authority collapses into the blunt reality of a man who has misjudged his opponent. The reversal is not simply a victory of physical strength: Tommy survives by keeping the performance intact until the moment when the other man’s assumptions can be used against him.

Rescue, Surveillance, and Appearance

Tuppence is recovered after Albert acts on the clues she has given him. When the pair leave in separate cars, Albert follows Tuppence by taxi, sees where she is taken, and calls the police. Tuppence later tells Tommy that she had passed him the message “The Fee, Shrimp Come to the Blitz,” and credits Albert with getting there in time. Her account establishes that the danger was not confined to Tommy’s encounter with the electric floor: she too had been carried into the impostors’ operation, and the agency’s office boy had become an active participant in the rescue.

Albert’s success continues the story’s interest in the gap between a role and the person performing it. In the agency office, his chosen office-boy character is defined by a paper bag of sweets, inky hands, and a tousled head; in the crisis, the supposedly humble assistant proves alert enough to follow a car, locate Tuppence, and contact the police. The performance that makes the agency look convincing does not exhaust his usefulness. Tommy calls him a good and chivalrous lad, acknowledging that he had expected Albert to follow Tuppence while admitting that he had remained worried.

The wider novel’s later investigation of diplomatic-bag smuggling echoes the same concern with appearances being managed for an audience. Tommy reasons that the important bag may not be the Ambassador’s own: the purpose may be to ensure that the other bag stays in the Ambassador’s possession, beyond Customs examination. He identifies drugs as the likely contraband and recognizes that a staged comedy in his office was meant to distract him or remove him from the way. The same practical habit of looking past the apparent story—who is really asking for help, and what object or identity is actually important—connects the electric-floor episode to the later case without making the two plots identical.

A further image of disguise appears in the discussion of the golf-course murder. Tuppence explains that a man could pass at a distance as a woman in a long brown skirt, sweater, felt hat, and side curls, then change back by removing the skirt and curls and putting on a cap. That exchange makes explicit the mechanics that the false Duke’s plan has already dramatized: a few visible cues can persuade observers to accept a new identity, while the truth depends on noticing the conditions and limits of the disguise. In Blindman’s Buff, the counterfeit duke’s name, Tommy’s fake eyeshade, Albert’s office-boy act, and the rescue’s reliance on following rather than trusting appearances all turn identity into something performed—and something an attentive observer can expose.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

After Tuppence confirms that Albert followed her and called the police, Tommy says he will return at once and write a large cheque for St. Dunstan’s, reflecting on how terrible it must be not to see. The remark follows the reveal that his own eyeshade was only a prop. It gives the deception a pointed aftermath: Tommy can treat blindness as a role in a game, but he recognizes, however briefly, that genuine loss of sight would be a different and serious condition. The episode does not erase the violence of the trap; the electrical current has felled a man, and the rescue has depended on quick action by both Tuppence and Albert.

The episode’s suspense is driven by successive corrections to what the characters—and the reader—think they know. The apparent detective is a performance; the celebrated client is a ham merchant; the supposed blindfold is false; and the captor’s carefully arranged game becomes a danger to its maker. The story makes theatricality a practical tool in the Beresfords’ work, but also shows its cost: an invented identity can summon a client or conceal a detective, while another person’s performance can turn an invitation to investigate into an abduction. The decisive advantage belongs to the person who continues to observe when everyone else has mistaken the appearance for the truth.