Ernest Bramah

Max Carrados is a fictional blind detective in a series of mystery stories and books by Ernest Bramah, first published in 1914. The Max Carrados stories appeared alongside Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine. Bramah was often billed above Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Carrados stories frequently outsold the Holmes stories at the time, even if they failed to achieve the same longevity.George Orwell wrote that, together with those of Doyle and R. Austin Freeman, Max Carrados and The Eyes of Max Carrados "are the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading." (wikipedia.org)

Max Carrados is a fictional blind detective in a series of mystery stories and books by Ernest Bramah, first published in 1914. The Max Carrados stories appeared alongside Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine. Bramah was often billed above Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Carrados stories frequently outsold the Holmes stories at the time, even if they failed to achieve the same longevity.George Orwell wrote that, together with those of Doyle and R. Austin Freeman, Max Carrados and The Eyes of Max Carrados "are the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading." (wikipedia.org)

The Specimen Case is a collection of twenty-one short stories written by Bramah over three decades. Two stories feature his most successful characters, the Chinese storyteller Kai Lung (‘Ming-Tsuen and the Emergency’) and the blind detective Max Carrados (‘The Bunch of Violets’). The sci-fi story ‘The War Hawks’ serves as a sequel to his influential novel What Might Have Been (1907), acknowledged by George Orwell for its impact on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Wallet of Kai Lung is a collection of fantasy stories, all but the last of which feature Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller of ancient China. The collection's importance in the history of fantasy literature was recognized by the anthologization of two of its tales in the celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, edited by Lin Carter; "The Vision of Yin" in Discoveries in Fantasy (March, 1972), and "The Transmutation of Ling" in Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy Volume II (March, 1973). Although the collection is presented in the fashion of a novel, with each of its component stories designated chapters, there is no overall plot aside from each of the first eight tales being presented as narratives told by Kai Lung at various points in his itinerant career. The final tale is represented as being from a manuscript left by its own separate first-person narrator, Kin Yen.