The Specimen Case by Ernest Bramah

BRAMAH, Ernest. The Specimen Case. London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1924.

First edition, scarce, of this collection of twenty-one short stories, in the original dust jacket illustrated by the British artist Mary Ellen Edwards.

The Specimen Case is a collection of twenty-one short stories written by Bramah over three decades. Two stories feature his most successful characters, the Chinese storyteller Kai Lung (‘Ming-Tsuen and the Emergency’) and the blind detective Max Carrados (‘The Bunch of Violets’). The sci-fi story ‘The War Hawks’ serves as a sequel to his influential novel What Might Have Been (1907), acknowledged by George Orwell for its impact on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Ernest Bramah, the pseudonym of Ernest Brammah Smith, was a prolific author of humorous, detective, science fiction and supernatural stories.

Octavo, pp. 320; near fine; original red cloth, titles in blind to front cover, lettered in black to spine, with the original pictorial dust jacket (spine slightly sunned, jacket very lightly soiled, with a few nicks to edges).