Ernest Bramah, pseudonym of Ernest Bramah Smith Biography

British writer, born near Manchester; he was a farmer for some years, the experience providing material for his first book, English Farming and why I Turned It Up (1894). He was also a provincial journalist, and secretary to Jerome K. Jerome before becoming a writer. His best-known works, praised by Belloc and Chesterton, are the short stories relating the activities of Kai Lung, an itinerant Chinese story-teller, written in a superbly polished, ludicrously exaggerated imitation of conventional Chinese modes of address and narration (The Wallet of Kai Lung, 1900, and other collections). His detective short stories are not only excellent as detection, but also interesting in that their hero, Max Carrados, is one of the few blind detectives in fiction. There are several collections, of which Max Carrados (1914) is the first. In the introduction to The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923), Bramah defends himself against the accusation that he has exaggerated his detective's abilities, citing instances of the power of the blind to develop their other senses.