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.
