Max Carrados is a blind detective who makes use of his remaining senses in such a way that his blindness is often not immediately apparent to others. Carrados enjoys the excitement of revealing his explanations of mysteries through powers of perception, which in his case are heightened in positive compensation for his visual impairment. George Orwell wrote that, together with those of Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman, Max Carrados stories "are the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading." Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) was an English author. He published numerous thriller books, detective stories and supernatural tales, creating the characters Kai Lung and Max Carrados. Bramah's detective stories were ranked with Conan Doyle, his politico-science fiction with H. G. Wells and his supernatural stories with Algernon Blackwood. Table of Contents: Max Carrados The Coin of Dionysius The Knight's Cross Signal Problem The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage The Clever Mrs. Straithwaite The Last Exploit Of Harry the Actor The Tilling Shaw Mystery The Comedy at Fountain Cottage The Game Played In the Dark The Eyes of Max Carrados The Virginiola Fraud The Disappearance of Marie Severe The Secret of Dunstan's Tower The Mystery of the Poisoned Dish of Mushrooms The Ghost at Massingham Mansions The Missing Actress Sensation The Ingenious Mr. Spinola The Kingsmouth Spy Case The Eastern Mystery Max Carrados Mysteries The Secret of Headlam Height The Mystery of the Vanished Petition Crown The Holloway Flat Tragedy The Curious Circumstances of the Two Left Shoes The Ingenious Mind of Mr. Rigby Lacksome The Crime at the House in Culver Street The Strange Case of Cyril Bycourt The Missing Witness Sensation The Bravo of London: A Novel

The adventures of a blind detective in London, featuring four compact mysteries: The Coin of Dionysius, The Knight's Cross Signal Problem, The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage & The Last Exploit of Harry the Actor.

This early work by Ernest Bramah was originally published in 1914 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Coin of Dionysius' is a mystery short story of a coin and a blind man. Ernest Bramah Smith was born was near Manchester in 1868. He was a poor student, and dropped out of the Manchester Grammar School when sixteen years old to go into the farming business. Bramah found commercial and critical success with his first novel, The Wallet of Kai Lung, but it was his later stories of detective Max Carrados that assured him lasting fame.

This early work by Ernest Bramah was originally published in 1914 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage' is a Max Carrados mystery of a man's plot to murder his wife. Ernest Bramah Smith was born was near Manchester in 1868. He was a poor student, and dropped out of the Manchester Grammar School when sixteen years old to go into the farming business. Bramah found commercial and critical success with his first novel, The Wallet of Kai Lung, but it was his later stories of detective Max Carrados that assured him lasting fame.

This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction. Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus—but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” anticipated Holmes’ deductive reasoning by more than forty years. In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe—and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier. If Rue Morgue was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Among the possibilities are two books by Wilkie Collins—The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)—Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and The Notting Hill Mystery (1862-3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.” As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages—hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted “cozy” murders in Britain—and these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured in these pages.

A collection of stories featuring detectives, criminal agents and debonair crooks from the golden age of crime fiction: a time when Sherlock Holmes was esconsced in his rooms at 221B Baker Street and London was permanently wreathed in a sinister fog.