James Hadley Chase & Lobsang Rampa

From Hadley Chase to Lobsang Rampa


Uzor Maxim Uzoatu



Back then as schoolboys in the 1970s we used to enjoy such authors as James Hadley Chase and T. Lobsang Rampa. It was much later in life that one learnt that James Hadley Chase was the penname of Rene Raymond, an Englishman who used to work for the booksellers Simpkin, Marshall. In the course of his work Mr. Raymond read many trashy thrillers written by American authors and felt he could write better than the lot. He then penned his own thriller in 1939 entitled No Orchids for Miss Blandish and sent it off to the Hutchinson publishing house then under the chairmanship of the half-mad “Mr. Walter” Hutchinson. Two positive readers’ reports were needed for the maverick publisher to agree to publish the book. An editor in the publishing company, Jim Reynolds, forged the two reports that convinced Mr. Hutchison. The author who had then adopted the pseudonym of James Hadley Chase was paid an advance of 30 pounds sterling. In a handful of years No Orchids for Miss Blandish sold a staggering half a million copies thus enabling James Hadley Chase to write more thrillers such as The Vulture is a Patient Bird, Believed Violent, The Way the Cookie Crumbles, An Ear to the Ground, This Way for a Shroud, Strictly for Cash etc.

The case of another author named T. (for Tuesday) Lobsang Rampa is even more fabulous. This Lobsang Rampa fellow wrote to the publishers, Secker and Warburg, that his real name was Dr Kuan-suo and that he had authored his autobiography in which he told the true story of his life as a lama in Tibet from the age of seven. According to the self-styled Lobsang Rampa, his search for higher knowledge in Tibet led to his being operated on to open a “third eye” in his forehead. This was done by boring a hole through his forehead! The book The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa was published in 1956 and quickly sold some 50,000 copies and was translated into a handful of languages before alarm bells rang fast and free about the dubiousness of the book.

The Daily Mail of London scooped that the so-called Lobsang Rampa was no Tibetan after all; he was in fact an Englishman named Cyril Henry Hoskins, the son of a plumber from Devon! He was in real life a surgical goods maker and part-time photographer. After he was exposed for the fraud he was Lobsang Rampa was traced to a hotel in Dublin where he was hiding. He made some very interesting explanations to the reporters.

He readily agreed that he was truly an Englishman but added the dimension that his body was inhabited by a Tibetan lama! Lobsang Rampa, also known as Dr Kuan-suo and Cyril Henry Hoskins, further explained that the lama took possession of his body on one inauspicious day in which he fell down from a tree while attempting to take photographs of an owl! It was while he lay on the ground that a lama in blue and saffron robes floated in the air toward him and then suddenly took possession of his body! This kind of a tall story is deserving of the ultimate prize in fiction writing. Lobsang Rampa, even as he was exposed as a hoax, went on to publish other books such as Doctor from Lhasa, The Rampa Story, Living with the Lama etc.

The intriguing life of Lobsang Rampa forms a part of the memoirs of his publisher Frederic Warburg entitled All Authors Are Equal. Actually other publishers had turned down Lobsang Rampa on the grounds that his proposition was implausible but the enthusiatic Warburg gave the benefit of the doubt to the self-styled mystic whom he agreed to meet over lunch. Publisher Warburg was surprised that mystic Rampa ordered only fish and chips for lunch!

The scoop by Daily Mail on Lobsang Rampa was masterminded by another writer with links to Tibet, Heinrich Harrer, the bestselling author of Seven Years in Tibet.

I have been reliably informed that a Nigerian publisher is in the process of re-publishing James Hadley Chase’s bestselling titles here in Nigeria. Methinks it would have made more sense encouraging Nigerian authors to write their own thrillers instead of reissuing Anglo-American junk. The way we are going, we may end up having a Nigerian publisher actually printing for Nigerian consumption the English 419 known as Lobsang Rampa. That will be the very limit.