Ernest Bramah

The Wallet of Kai Lung Ernest Bramah

Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) was an English author of considerable repute in his day. In total Bramah published 21 books and numerous short stories and features. His humorous works were ranked with Jerome K Jerome, and W. W. Jacobs; his detective stories with Conan Doyle; his politico-science fiction with H. G. Wells and his supernatural stories with Algernon Blackwood. George Orwell acknowledged that Bramah's book What Might Have Been (1907) influenced his seminal Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). Bramah, the creator of the immortal Kai Lung and Max Carrados, was a recluse who refused to allow his public even the slightest glimpse of his private life - secrecy perhaps only matched by E. W. Hornung, the creator of Raffles, and today, J. D. Salinger. We now know that Bramah, whose real name was Smith, was a man of erudition and prescience with a unique style of writing that has never been copied. Among his most famous works are: Four Max Carrados Detective Stories (1914), Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922), The Mirror of Kong Ho (1905) and The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900).