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.