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Ernest Bramah Smith, born in 1868, was brought up in Lancashire, England, where he attended Manchester Grammar School. Smith did badly in his academic studies and, after leaving school in 1884, took up farming. While it was an unsuccessful experience, nearly bankrupting his father, farming gave Smith the material for his first book, English Farming, and Why I Turned It Up, which was published as by Ernest Bramah. Inspired by the book’s modest success, Smith took up journalism and secured a position working for the author Jerome K. Jerome at Today Magazine to which Smith contributed numerous short, largely humorous, pieces. He would remain a writer for the rest of his life, editing one magazine—The Minister—and contributing to many others including Chapman’s, Macmillan’s, The Storyteller, London Mercury, Everybody’s and the Windsor, as well as the prestigious title The Graphic.

In the late 1890s, not long after marrying his wife Lucy Maisie Barker at Holborn, London, Smith created the character that was to make him famous: Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller whose tales and proverbs help him to outwit brigands and thieves in ancient China.

‘My unbecoming name is Kai, to which has been added that of Lung. By profession I am an incapable relater of imagined tales and to this end I spread my mat wherever my uplifted voice can entice together a company to listen. Should my feeble efforts be deemed worthy of reward, those who stand around may perchance contribute to my scanty store, but sometimes this is judged superfluous.’

While many modern readers would dismiss the slyly comic Kai Lung stories as literary yellowface, they were immensely popular on first publication and for many years later and, although Smith never visited China, his portrayal of the Chinese and their customs was accepted as a guide to a country about which most contemporary readers and reviewers knew very little. However, the character of Kai Lung has dated badly and Smith’s purple prose, replicating what he and others considered ‘Oriental quaintness’ and ‘the charm of Oriental courtesy’, means that his many stories of Kai Lung and other Chinese ‘characters’ are little read today.

While continuing to write about Kai Lung, Smith showed himself something of a domestic satirist with, in 1907, The Secret of the League, ‘the story of a social war’ inspired by the success of the then nascent Labour Party in the 1906 General Election. In Smith’s novel, a Labour Government is elected and, crushed by ‘the dead weight of taxation’ and other socialist ‘evils’, the middle classes rise up and, by undermining the coal industry and coal-dependent businesses, cause the Government to collapse. While it anticipates elements of Chris Mullin’s 1982 satire A Very British Coup by more than sixty years, Smith’s novel may seem offensive and naïve. Nonetheless, his predictions of the kinds of policies that a Labour Government would introduce proved in some instances to be not that far off the mark and, despite the anti-democratic tactics of Smith’s ‘Unity League’, his novel was widely praised at the time by Conservative Party politicians and their supporters at the Spectator and elsewhere.

It was in 1913 that Smith created his other great character, Max Carrados the blind detective, who first appeared in a series of stories written specially for The News of the World, a British weekly newspaper. Carrados was immediately hailed as something new and the stories about him were read avidly. He was not the first blind detective but he was the first whose other senses more than compensated for the loss of his sight, which was the result of a riding accident; Carrados therefore has much in common with Lincoln Rhyme, Jeffrey Deaver’s quadriplegic New York detective. And while Carrados and his friend, Louis Carlyle, owe something to Holmes and Watson, the detective’s closest fictional contemporary would be the preternaturally omniscient Dr John Thorndyke, the creation of Richard Austin Freeman. There are also many similarities between the characters of Carrados’s South London household and their North London equivalents in Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke stories, while more than one contemporary critic suggested that Carrados might have been inspired by the career of Edward Emmett, a blind solicitor from Burnley, Lancashire, who achieved some celebrity towards the end of the nineteenth century. If Emmett was an inspiration, Smith never acknowledged it, rebutting scepticism in later years about Carrados’s abilities ‘in the fourth dimension’ by pointing to the abilities and achievements of Helen Keller and Sir John Fielding, as well as to those of less well-known figures such as the seventeenth-century mathematician Nicholas Saunderson and the soldier and road-builder John Metcalf, better known as Blind Jack of Knaresborough.

In all, Max Carrados would appear in 26 short stories, including A Bunch of Violets, the only story about the blind detective not included in any of the three collections of Carrados short stories published in Smith’s lifetime. As well as the detective, Smith’s stories about Carrados feature some economically drawn but memorable characters: these include his amanuensis, Parkinson, who has an eidetic but erratic memory; the self-described ‘pug-ugly’ Miss Frensham, once known as ‘The Girl with the Golden Mug’; the brilliant ‘lady cryptographer’ Clifton Parker; and the detective’s school-friend Jim ‘Earwigs’ Tulloch. Moreover, the Carrados stories often feature contemporary concerns like Irish and Indian nationalist terrorism, the perils of Christian Science and the struggle for universal suffrage. Nonetheless, despite the stories’ merits, Carrados’s hyper-sensory brilliance can sometimes appear unconvincing, no more so than in ‘The Tilling Shaw Mystery’ when he is able to detect, by smell and taste, traces of whitewash on a cigarette-paper after it has been used as wadding and fired from a revolver.

During the First World War, in 1916, Smith enlisted in the Royal Defence Corps. This led to his writing non-fiction pieces for Punch and various other magazines on subjects as diverse as censorship and the military use of animals. When the war ended, Smith went back to journalism proper, writing a steady flow of short stories and articles, a book on British copper coinage in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and a comic fantasy, the novel A Little Flutter concerning a middle-aged city clerk’s unusual inheritance and the fate of a Groo-Groo, a giant Patagonian bird. Smith later adapted A Little Flutter for the stage, and he also adapted two of the Carrados stories, ‘The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage’ and ‘The Ingenious Mind of Rigby Lacksome’, though there is as yet no evidence that any of these scripts were ever performed. But that is not the case with Smith’s only original stage play to feature Max Carrados, Blind Man’s Bluff, which opened at the Chelsea Palace of Varieties on 8 April 1918. Smith had written the play for the actor Gilbert Heron who, the previous year, had had great success with an adaptation of the Carrados story, ‘The Game Played in the Dark’. Heron’s play, In the Dark, had opened at the London Metropolitan Music Hall in February 1917 as a dramatic interlude in a programme that featured the famous ventriloquist Fred Russell and other variety acts. The play was reviewed positively, not least for its ‘great surprise finish’ when, as in Smith’s short story, the final scene was performed in absolute darkness. Blind Man’s Bluff also includes a blackout, which Carrados brings about in the thrilling climax of a battle of wits with a cold-blooded spy, and—betraying its origins as a music hall act—his play also ingeniously accommodates an on-stage demonstration of ju-jitsu. Both of the plays continued to be included in variety bills until the early 1920s, while In the Dark was broadcast on radio by the fledgling British Broadcasting Company (later ‘Corporation’ from 1927) several times including, for the last time, in 1930.

The last of Smith’s 26 short stories about Carrados was published in 1927 but Smith revived the character for the novel-length thriller The Bravo of London, which was first published in 1934 and later adapted—by Smith—for the stage, though again no performances have yet been traced. Although the novel has something in common with the short story ‘The Missing Witness Sensation’, first published in Pearson’s Magazine eight years earlier, Carrados’s return, in which he faces the monstrous forger Julian Joolby, was welcomed by readers and critics alike, with one reviewer praising the author for ‘a sound sense of the macabre and a grim humour which raises his work above the average level of thrillers’. A year later, Carrados took his last bow in a profile written and narrated by Smith for the radio series Meet the Detective, broadcast on the BBC’s Empire Service in May 1935. While Carrados was not to appear again, Smith continued to write stories about Kai Lung, with the final collection of stories, Kai Lung beneath the Mulberry Tree, appearing in 1940, forty years after the wiliest of philosophers’ first appearance in The Wallet of Kai Lung.

A very private man throughout his life, Smith died in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, in 1942.

TONY MEDAWAR

March 2018