The Missing Witness Sensation (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 Missing Witness Sensation' is an intriguing mystery tale of kidnap. 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: 9781473378759

Ernest Bramah

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

Book preview

The Missing Witness

Sensation

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

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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 Missing Witness Sensation

In its earlier stages the Ayr Street Post Office robbery had attracted little notice. Afterwards, owing to causes with which this narrative has to do, it achieved the distinction of passing into the grade of what Detective Inspector Beedel was wont to refer to with quiet professional enthusiasm as ‘First-class Crimes’. But so meagre was public interest in the initial proceedings that when Mr Carrados looked in at the magistrate’s court purely for old acquaintance’s sake one stifling afternoon, he found the place half empty.

‘Post office hold-up—Ayr Street case, sir,’ explained the officer on duty at the door. ‘Party named Rank charged. Pretty nearly over now, I should say.’

‘Philip Thaxted!’ cried a voice across the court.

‘New witness for the defence,’ whispered the policeman. ‘Like a seat, sir?’

‘Don’t trouble—I may only stay a minute. Who are conducting?’

‘Mr Booker’s for the Public Prosecutor. I don’t know the defence—not one of our regular people here.’

‘He is speaking now?’

‘Yes, sir.’

A plainly dressed man with a firmly lined and rather artistic face, iron-grey hair, and a quiet, self-confident manner,