The Crime at the House in Culver Street (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 Crime at the House in Culver Street' is a classic case for blind super sleuth Max Carrados. 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: 9781473378780

Ernest Bramah

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

Book preview

The Crime at the House in

Culver Street

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 Crime at the House

in Culver Street

The garden gate of Thornden Lodge stood open as the Bellmarks walked past, and from the path beyond there came the sharp aggressive click of decisive shears at work. Elsie Bellmark grew irresolute, then stopped.

‘Do you mind if I just pop in for a wee moment, Roy?’ she asked. ‘I expect that it’s Miss Barrowford gardening, and it will save me writing. G.F.S. business, you know.’

‘All right,’ her husband replied. ‘Only don’t forget me and stay to supper.’

‘The idea! As if I ever—I’ll catch you up—or won’t you come in too? You know her.’

‘No,’ he decided. ‘If I do we shall be talking there for an hour. I won’t go right on either. I’ll just hang about in the middle distance to keep you up to the mark.’

With a nod and a smile she left him, and almost immediately the sound of the shears ceased and through the privet hedge came the rather ecstatic interchange of greetings. A grin of affectionate amusement came into Bellmark’s face as he slowly lit a cigarette.

‘It’s long