A Game Played in the Dark

Bramah attained commercial and critical success with his creation of Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller. He first appears in The Wallet of Kai Lung which was rejected by eight publishers before Grant Richards published it in 1900. It was still in print a hundred years later. The Kai Lung stories are humorous tales set in China, often with fantasy elements such as dragons and gods. Bramah also wrote political science fiction. What Might Have Been, published in 1907 and republished as The Secret of the League in 1909, is an anti-socialist dystopia representing Bramah's conservative political opinions. It was acknowledged by George Orwell as a source for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell credited it with giving a considerably accurate prediction of the rise of Fascism. At a time when the English Channel had yet to be crossed by an aeroplane, Bramah foresaw aerial express trains traveling at 10,000 feet, a nationwide wireless-telegraphy network, a prototype fax machine and a cypher typewriter similar to the German Enigma machine. In 1914, Bramah created Max Carrados, a blind detective. Given the outlandish idea that a blind man could be a detective, in the introduction to the second Carrados book The Eyes of Max Carrados, Bramah compared his hero's achievements to those of real-life blind people such as Nicholas Saunderson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Blind Jack of Knaresborough the road builder, John Fielding the Bow Street Magistrate (of whom it was said he could identify 3,000 thieves by their voices), and Helen Keller. In 1929, Bramah wrote the book "English Regal Copper Coins" which was published by Methuen. The book concentrates on British copper coinage from 1671 during the reign of Charles II until the end of pure copper coin production in 1860. The book is still used widely by numismatic auction houses throughout the world with Bramah reference numbers. The section on coin rarity as a percentage of production for each year is still considered useful to date.