The classic crime novel featuring blind detective Max Carrados, whose popularity rivalled that of Sherlock Holmes, complete with a new introduction and an extra short story.In his dark little curio shop Julian Joolby is weaving an extravagant scheme to smash the financial machinery of the world by flooding the Oriental market with forged banknotes. But this monster of wickedness has not reckoned on Max Carrados, the suave and resourceful investigator whose visual impairment gives him heightened powers of perception that ordinary detectives overlook.Max Carrados was a blind detective whose stories by Ernest Bramah appeared from 1914 alongside Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine, in which they often had top billing. Described by George Orwell as among ‘the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading’, the 25 stories were collected in three hugely popular volumes, culminating in a full-length novel, The Bravo of London (1934), in which Carrados engages in a battle of wits against a fiendish plot that threatens to overthrow civilisation itself.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Tony Medawar, who investigates the impact on the genre of Bramah’s blind detective and the relative obscurity of this, the only Max Carrados novel. This edition also includes the sole uncollected short story ‘The Bunch of Violets’.As well as on the page, the Max Carrados stories have been a firm favourite on television and film, played over the years by (among others) Robert Stephens, Simon Callow and Pip Torrens, and read on audio by Arthur Darvill and Stephen Fry.

The Bravo of London: And ‘The Bunch of Violets’ (Detective Club Crime Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Bramah, Ernest

Genre Fiction

Collins Crime Club

Kai Lung's Golden Hours By Ernest Bramah. Preface: Hilaire Belloc. Man is born to make. His business is to construct; to plan; to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing. That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end and in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other is the art of writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless and ephemeral; and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed, The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence; that a piece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, the character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition. It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglect construction. We write to establish a record for a few days; or to send a thousand unimportant messages;or to express for others or for ourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of emotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannot command it. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings, for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff, But when a man sets out to write as a serious business, proclaiming by the nature of his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinks worthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to whom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible. Yet,I say,the great mass of men today do not attempt it in the English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book at random, say at once;This is the voice of such and such an one. It is no one's manner or voice. It is part of a common babel. Therefore in such a time as that of our decline,to come across work which is planned, executed and achieved has something of the effect produced by the finding of a wrought human thing in a wild, It is like finding, as I once found, deep hidden in the tangled rank grass of autumn in Burgundy, on the edge of a wood not far from Dijon, a neglected statue of the eighteenth century. It is like coming round the corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains and seeing before one a well cultivated close and a strong house in the midst. It is now many years,I forget how many it may be twenty or more, or it may be a little less since The Wallet of Kai Lung was sent me by a friend, The effect produced upon my mind at the first opening of its pages was in the same category as the effect produced by the discovery of that hidden statue in Burgundy, or the coming upon an unexpected house in the turn of a high Pyrenean gorge.

Kai Lung's Golden Hours

Contemporary

Ballantine Books

Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat

Literary

This early work by Ernest Bramah was originally published in 1911 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree' is one of Bramah's works in the Kai Lung series. 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.

Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree (Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Ayer Co. Pub

A popular English author of considerable repute in his day, Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) published twenty-one books and numerous short stories. His science fiction was compared to the works of H. G. Wells, his detective stories with Conan Doyle's, and his humorous novels with those of Jerome K. Jerome. Bramah was also famed for his traditional tales of Chinese literature. Brimming with colorful characters and concepts, these exotic fantasies are filled with corrupt mandarins, beautiful maidens, greedy merchants, alchemical potions, and more. A captivating collection that's ripe for rediscovery, Kai Lung's Golden Hours stands as the very best of these beguiling books. Kai Lung is a wandering storyteller accused of treason—and like Scheherazade of The One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, he must rely upon his silver tongue to escape conviction. With the help of beautiful Hwa Mei, who has the attention of evil Ming Shu, Kai tries to regain his freedom by spinning a series of entertaining tales that intrigue his captor. Laced with romance and adventure, spiced with fantasy and the supernatural, these stories will transport readers to a mandarin's court in ancient China.

Dover Publications

Sightless detective Max Carrados solved his first cases in Edwardian London, in the early days of the 20th century when the city was the beating heart of the vast British Empire. This collection contains the very best tales of the blind sleuth, 10 adventures that range from his first challenge, "The Coin of Dionysus," to mysteries set during the World War I era and the early 1920s. Like Sherlock Holmes, Max Carrados debuted in The Strand magazine, and his stories rivaled those of the Baker Street detective in popularity. Since then, compilation volumes of the frequently anthologized tales have long been out of print and hard to find. This collection offers an excellent introduction to the suave private investigator whose deductive skills are surpassed only by his perceptive powers, which enable him to hear a heartbeat from across the room. Carrados' creator, Ernest Bramah, was one of the few authors in the early days of detective fiction who could combine physical and intellectual thrills with imagination and stylistic brilliance. Brimming with charm and humor, these vintage stories are utterly unique in the field of detective literature.

The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories (Dover Mystery Classics)

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

The Mirror of Kong Ho

Short Stories & Anthologies

BiblioLife

Wildside Press

"The Wallet of Kai Lung was a thing made deliberately, in hard material and completely successful. It was meant to produce a particular effect of humour by the use of a foreign convention, the Chinese convention, in the English tongue. It was meant to produce a certain effect of philosophy and at the same time it was meant to produce a certain completed interest of fiction, of relation, of a short epic. It did all these things. . . . It is one of the tests of excellent work that such work is economic, that is, that there is nothing redundant in order or in vocabulary, and at the same time nothing elliptic--in the full sense of that word: that is, no sentence in which so much is omitted that the reader is left puzzled. That is the quality you get in really good statuary--in Houdon, for instance, or in that triumph the archaic Archer in the Louvre. The Wallet of Kai Lung satisfied all these conditions." --Hilaire Belloc

The Wallet of Kai Lung

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bramah, Ernest. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bramah, Ernest

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bramah, Ernest. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Bravo of London: And ‘The Bunch of Violets’ (Detective Club Crime Classics)

Kai Lung's Golden Hours

Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat

Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree (Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction)

Kai Lung's Golden Hours

The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories (Dover Mystery Classics)

The Mirror of Kong Ho

The Mirror of Kong Ho

Kai Lung's Golden Hours

The Wallet of Kai Lung