Ernest Bramah - Author

Author

Bramah attained commercial and critical success with his creation of Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller. He first appears in The Wallet of Kai Lung which was rejected by eight publishers before Grant Richards, who published it in 1900. It was still in print a hundred years later. The Kai Lung stories are humorous tales set in China, often with fantasy elements such as dragons and gods.

With Kai Lung, Bramah invented a form of Mandarin English illustrated by the following passages:

Kai Lung rose guardedly to his feet, with many gestures of polite assurance and having bowed several times to indicate his pacific nature, he stood in an attitude of deferential admiration. At this display the elder and less attractive of the maidens fled, uttering loud and continuous cries of apprehension in order to conceal the direction of her flight.

and

In particular, there is among this august crowd of Mandarins one Wang Yu, who has departed on three previous occasions without bestowing the reward of a single cash. If the feeble and covetous Wang Yu will place in his very ordinary bowl the price of one of his exceedingly ill-made pipes, this unworthy person will proceed.

and

After secretly observing the unstudied grace of her movements, the most celebrated picture-maker of the province burned the implements of his craft, and began life anew as a trainer of performing elephants.

The Kai Lung stories are studded with proverbs and aphorisms, such as the following

• “He who lacks a single tael sees many bargains.”
• “It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one’s time in looking for the sacred Emperor in low-class teashops.”
• “It has been said there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night.”

Bramah also wrote political science fiction. His book What might Have Been, published in 1907 and republished as The Secret of the League in 1909), is an anti-socialist dystopia reflecting Bramah's conservative political views. It was acknowledged by George Orwell as a source for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell credited it with giving a considerably accurate prediction of the rise of Fascism. In this book, a Socialist government heavily taxes the middle classes, greatly expands a civil service, and engenders a pension crisis, before being overthrown by a capital strike.

At a time when the English Channel had yet to be crossed by an aeroplane, Bramah foresaw aerial express trains travelling at 10,000 feet, a nationwide wireless-telegraphy network, a proto-fax machine and a cypher typewriter similar to the German Enigma machine.

In 1914 Bramah created Max Carrados, a blind detective. Given the outlandish idea that a blind man could be a detective, in the introduction to the second Carrados book The Eyes of Max Carrados Bramah compared his hero’s achievements to those of real life blind people such as Nicholas Saunderson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Blind Jack of Knaresborough the road builder, John Fielding the Bow Street Magistrate of whom it was said he could identify 3,000 thieves by their voices, and Helen Keller. Bramah’s sympathy for and understanding of the blind was sincere and practical.

The Max Carrados stories appeared alongside Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine, indeed they had top billing and frequently outsold his eminent contemporary.