Ernest Bramah Smith (1868-1942) was a British author. He was born near Manchester and became a journalist before being recruited by Jerome K Jerome to work as his secretary.

He achieved the remarkable feat of being successful on a continuing basis in two strikingly different forms of fiction. His detective-fiction character, the blind but remarkably percipient Max Carrados, was well received through several volumes of his exploits.

Bramah also created "a China that never was" and set in it tales of an itinerant story teller named Kai Lung; these tales (often tales-within-tales) are marked by a dry irony and deliciously absurd parody of the formally polite Chinese mode of expression, as understood by westerners of the time. The Kai Lung tales were quite popular with the intelligensia of the times: writers from Dorothy L. Sayers to Thorne Smith mention the urbane tales in their own works.