A Bullet in the Ballet

Towards the end of the 1920s, finding it difficult to keep up the supply of new stories for Low’s cartoon series, Brahms enlisted the help of a Russian friend, S. J. Simon, whom she had met at a hostel when they were both students. The partnership was successful, and Brahms and Simon started to write comic thrillers together. The first, A Bullet in the Ballet, had its genesis in a frivolous fantasy spun by the collaborators when Brahms was deputizing for Arnold Haskell as dance critic of The Daily Telegraph. Brahms proposed a murder mystery set in the ballet world with Haskell as the corpse. Simon took the suggestion as a joke, but Brahms insisted that they press ahead with the plot (although Haskell was not a victim in the finished work). The book introduced the phlegmatic Inspector Adam Quill and the excitable members of Vladimir Stroganoff’s ballet company, who later reappeared in three more books between 1938 and 1945. Some thought that Stroganoff was based on the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, but Brahms pointed out that Diaghilev appears briefly in the novels in his own right, and she said of Stroganoff, “Suddenly he was there. I used to have the impression that he wrote us, rather than that we wrote him.”