A fictitious blind investigator named Max Carrados appears in Ernest Bramah's 1914 collection of mystery stories and books, Four Max Carrados Detective Stories. In the Strand Magazine, the four Max Carrados detective stories coexisted with the Sherlock Holmes adventures. The Carrados stories routinely outsold the Holmes stories at the time, even though they didn't have the same length. Bramah was frequently billed above Arthur Conan Doyle. Max Carrados and The Eyes of Max Carrados, according to George Orwell, "are the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading," together with those of Doyle and R. Austin Freeman. In the first narrative, "The Coin of Dionysius," Max Carrados and his regular sidekick Mr. Carlyle's personalities are described. Private investigator Mr. Carlyle oversees a business that focuses primarily on divorce and defalcation. For an expert opinion on a tetradrachm of Dionysius the Elder of Sicily that he suspects may have been a counterfeit put into a famous collection during a theft, he is led to Wynn Carrados' residence at The Turrets in Richmond, London. When they first meet, the blind Carrados quickly recognizes Mr. Carlyle as Louis Calling, a former classmate from St. Michael's.
Ernest Bramah (20 March 1868 – 27 June 1942), the pseudonym of Ernest Brammah Smith, was an English author. Along with numerous short stories and features, he also wrote 21 novels. His comedic writings were frequently compared to those of Jerome K. Jerome and W. W. Jacobs, while his detective tales, politico-science fiction, and supernatural tales were placed alongside those of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Algernon Blackwood. George Orwell admitted that What Might Have Been by Bramah had an impact on his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Kai Lung and Max Carrados were created by Bramah. Bramah's conception of the traveling storyteller Kai Lung was a commercial and critical success. He initially appears in Grant Richards' 1900 publication of The Wallet of Kai Lung, which was rejected by eight other publishers. One hundred years later, it was still in print. The Kai Lung Tales are lighthearted Chinese folktales that frequently feature fantastical elements like dragons and gods. A political science fiction author is Bramah. The anti-socialist dystopia What Might Have Been, first published in 1907 and reissued as The Secret of the League in 1909, reflects Bramah's conservative political views. It served as a source for George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
