Ernest Bramah

Biography

Ernest Brammah Smith was born on March 20th, 1868 to Charles Clement Smith and Susannah Brammah in Manchester where his father was a successful warehouseman. An unsuccessful student, Ernest dropped out of the Manchester Grammar School, an old and prestigious institution, when he was sixteen (with grades that ranked near the bottom of his class in nearly every subject). After a brief stint farming, young Ernest decided to try his hand at journalism, where he had much more success and from which he made the transition to novelist. Adopting the pen name Ernest Bramah, Ernest’s primary interest was in genre fiction, and, throughout his life, he would dabble in everything from humor to science fiction to speculative fiction; one story, What Might Have Been, influenced George Orwell’s 1984. However, undoubtedly his two biggest successes came with the creation of his two most famous characters: Kai Lung and Max Carrados.

Bramah specialized in pulp fiction similar to writers Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Arthur Conan Doyle whose novels dealt with the adventures of a single, iconic character. Doyle especially was an obvious influence on Bramah, as the latter’s character Max Carrados was a detective similar to Sherlock Holmes. The difference between the two was that Bramah appears to have indulged in much more schlocky fiction, with the character Max Carrados being a blind detective who solves crimes using his heightened senses. However, Bramah’s most successful character was undoubtedly that of the Chinese storyteller Kai Lung, whose stories Bramah wrote in a form of “Mandarin English,” his own invention. These stories were so popular that many of the aphorisms Bramah invented for them are falsely thought of as actual Chinese sayings to this day (such as “May you find what you are looking for”). It is these stories that will most inform the story included here, “Wang-Ho and the Burial Robe” published in The London Mercury. This short story also features Bramah’s Mandarin English and many of the trappings that made his other series so successful and will hopefully serve as a microcosm of Bramah’s writing as a whole.