Ernest Bramah

The Specimen Case is a collection of twenty-one short stories written by Bramah over three decades. Two stories feature his most successful characters, the Chinese storyteller Kai Lung (‘Ming-Tsuen and the Emergency’) and the blind detective Max Carrados (‘The Bunch of Violets’). The sci-fi story ‘The War Hawks’ serves as a sequel to his influential novel What Might Have Been (1907), acknowledged by George Orwell for its impact on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Wallet of Kai Lung is a collection of fantasy stories, all but the last of which feature Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller of ancient China. The collection's importance in the history of fantasy literature was recognized by the anthologization of two of its tales in the celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, edited by Lin Carter; "The Vision of Yin" in Discoveries in Fantasy (March, 1972), and "The Transmutation of Ling" in Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy Volume II (March, 1973). Although the collection is presented in the fashion of a novel, with each of its component stories designated chapters, there is no overall plot aside from each of the first eight tales being presented as narratives told by Kai Lung at various points in his itinerant career. The final tale is represented as being from a manuscript left by its own separate first-person narrator, Kin Yen.

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.