This early work by Ernest Bramah was originally published in 1924 and we are now republishing it for the modern reader. 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. During his late teens, he began to contribute short stories and vignettes to the Birmingham News. A few years later, he moved to London"s Grub Street - famous for its concentration of impoverished "hack writers" - and eventually became editor of a number of journals. At the height of his fame, Bramah"s mystery tales, featuring the blind detective Max Carrados, appeared alongside Sir Arthur Conan Doyle"s Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine, even occasionally outselling them.