Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) created a sleuth whose popularity rivalled that of Sherlock Holmes: Max Carrados, a blind detective who solves crimes thanks to his extraordinary skills at reading things with his fingers and paying attention to the sounds that other people overlook. Bramah was an extremely private man, who abandoned a career in farming to become a local newspaper correspondent. He moved to London as secretary to the humorist Jerome K. Jerome and did editorial work on several magazines before turning to writing as a full-time occupation, also creating a hugely successful series of books about the itinerant rogue, Kai Lung, set in the lush atmosphere of China and praised by the novelist Hilaire Belloc.