Ernest Bramah

Ernest Bramah Smith (1868-1942) was a British author.

He achieved the remarkable feat of being successful on a continuing basis in two strikingly different forms of fiction. His detective-fiction character, the blind but remarkably percipient Max Carrados, was well received through several volumes of his exploits.

Bramah also created "a China that never was" and set in it tales of an itinerant story teller named Kai Lung; these tales (often tales-within-tales) are marked by a dry irony and deliciously absurd parody of the formally polite Chinese mode of expression, as understood by westerners of the time. The Kai Lung tales were quite popular with the intelligensia of the times: writers from Dorothy L. Sayers to Thorne Smith mention the urbane tales in their own works.

External links

• Crime and Chinoiserie
• Ernest Bramah Bibliography
• Bramah First Editions
• A Delicate Bouquet of Crime: The Plausibility of Max Carrados, Blind Detective
• Ernest Bramah: an evaluation of his Kai Lung works
• Ernest Bramah – some appreciative thoughts
• Project Gutenberg: public-domain etexts of some Bramah works