S.J. Simon

S. J. "Skid" Simon (1904 – 27 July 1948), born Seca Jascha Skidelsky, was a British fiction writer and bridge player. From 1937 until his death he collaborated with Caryl Brahms on a series of comic novels and short stories, mostly with a background of ballet or of English history. As a bridge expert, he was jointly responsible for developing the Acol system of bidding.

Simon was born in Harbin, Manchuria. A member of a Russian-Jewish merchant family from Vladivostok, he left Russia when young. He was educated at Tonbridge School in England and the University of London. In the 1920s he was studying forestry, when he met Caryl Brahms, who recruited him to help her write the captions for "Musso, the home page dog", a daily series of satirical cartoons drawn by David Low in The Evening Standard.

From 1937 to 1950 Brahms and Simon collaborated on a series of comic novels, eleven published by Michael Joseph. The first was A Bullet in the Ballet, which introduced the phlegmatic Inspector Adam Quill and the eccentric members of Vladimir Stroganoff's ballet company. The book originated in what Simon supposed to be a momentary fantasy on the part of Brahms; she was enjoying deputising for the leading ballet critic Arnold Haskell, and over coffee she and Simon dreamt up an impromptu ballet murder mystery with Haskell as the victim. They developed this idea into a novel in which the Ballet Stroganoff is stalked by a murderer. Brahms later recalled their collaboration:

It was like a long, laughing, wrangling conversation with both of us jumping on one another. ... We would speak lines to each other – we would laugh at our own jokes. It would have to be a very bad day if we had to tell one another what [Stroganoff] was going to say or do – we just knew.

A Bullet in the Ballet was warmly reviewed. In The Times Literary Supplement, David Murray wrote that the book provoked "continuous laughter ... Old Stroganoff with his troubles, artistic, amorous and financial, his shiftiness, and his perpetual anxiety about the visit of the great veteran of ballet-designers – 'if 'e come', is a vital creation. ... The book stands out for shockingness and merriment." The sexual entanglements, both straight and gay, of the members of the Ballet Stroganoff are depicted with a cheerful matter-of-factness unusual in the 1930s. Murray commented, "True, a certain number of the laughs are invited for a moral subject that people used not to mention with such spade-like explicitness, if at all." In The Observer, "Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers) commented on the "sexual reminiscences of infinite variety" and called the novel "a delicious little satire" but "not a book for the old girl". In the 1980s, Michael Billington praised the writing: "a power of language of which Wodehouse would not have been ashamed. As a description of a domineering Russian mother put down by her ballerina daughter, you could hardly better: 'She backed away like a defeated steamroller.'"

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