The Mystery of the Vanished Petition Crown (A Classic Short Story of Detective Max Carrados)

By Ernest Bramah

This early work by Ernest Bramah was originally published in 1927 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Mystery of The Vanished Petition Crown' is a case of an auction scam for super sleuth Max Carrados to solve. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473378711

Ernest Bramah

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) was an English author of detective fiction.

Book preview

The Mystery of The

Vanished Petition Crown

By

Ernest Bramah

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ernest Bramah

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.

Bramah found commercial and critical success with his first novel, The Wallet of Kai Lung, in 1900. The character of Kai Lang – a travelling storyteller in China – went on to feature in a number of his works, many of which featured fantasy elements such as dragons and gods, and utilised an idiosyncratic form of Mandarin English. Something of a recluse, Bramah also wrote political science fiction – in fact, his 1907 novel The Secret of the League was acknowledged by George Orwell as a forerunner to his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four – and even tried his hand at detective fiction. 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. Bramah died in 1942, aged 74.

The Mystery of The Vanished

Petition Crown

Max Carrados always seemed inclined to laugh quietly if anyone happened to mention the curious disappearance of the Willington Petition Crown. Why he should have been amused rarely came out at such times, perhaps because it is not expedient for one private collector openly to accuse another private collector of barefaced theft (whatever misgivings the majority may secretly admit of one another’s morals), but the extent of his knowledge in the affair will emerge from the following pages.

As a specialist in Greek tetradrachms Carrados would naturally only have a condescending interest in any of the non-classical branches of numismatics, but it was an interest that drew him to every word of coin news that appeared. As his delicate fingertips skimmed the morning paper headings at breakfast one day they ‘read’ for him a line that promised some entertainment, and the item was duly blue-pencilled for consideration later. It was no effort for the blind man to pick out all the essentials of the newspaper’s contents in this way; he could even, though not with the same facility, read the ordinary smaller type, but where there was no special