S.J. "Skid" Simon (Seca Jascha Skidelsky) (1904 – 27 July 1948) was a British author 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.
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Simon was born in Harbin, Manchuria. As 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.[1]
From 1937 Brahms and Simon collaborated on a series of comic novels, beginning with 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.[1] 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.[1]
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."[2] 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."[2] 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".[3] 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.'"[4]
The book was a best-seller in the UK, and was published in an American edition by Doubleday.[5][6] The authors followed up their success with a sequel, Casino for Sale (1938), featuring all the survivors from the first novel and bringing to the fore Stroganoff's rival impresario, the rich and vulgar Lord Buttonhooke.[7] It was published in the U.S. as Murder à la Stroganoff.[5] The Elephant is White (1939), tells the story of a young Englishman and the complications arising from his visit to a Russian night club in Paris. It was not well reviewed.[8] A third Stroganoff novel, Envoy on Excursion (1940) was a comic spy-thriller, with Quill now working for British intelligence.[9]
In 1940, Brahms and Simon published the first of what they called "backstairs history", producing their own highly unreliable comic retellings of English history. Don't, Mr. Disraeli! is a Victorian Romeo and Juliet story, with affairs of the feuding middle-class Clutterwick and Shuttleforth families interspersed with 19th century vignettes ("At the Savage Club the atmosphere is tense. Gilbert and Sullivan have fallen out again.") and anachronistic intruders from the 20th century, including Harpo Marx, John Gielgud and Albert Einstein.[10] In The Observer, Frank Swinnerton wrote, "They turn the Victorian age into phantasmagoria, dodging with the greatest possible nimbleness from the private to the public, skipping among historic scenes, which they often deride, and personal jokes and puns, and telling a ridiculous story while they communicate a preposterous – yet strangely suggestive – impression of nineteenth-century life."[11]
To follow their Victorian book, Brahms and Simon went back to Elizabethan times, with No Bed for Bacon (1941). Unlike the earlier work, the narrative and allusions are confined to the age in which the book is set. The plot concerns a young woman who disguises herself as a boy to gain membership of Richard Burbage's, and more particularly William Shakespeare's, theatrical company (a device later employed by Tom Stoppard as the central plot of his 1999 screenplay Shakespeare in Love).[12] Reviewing the book in the Shakespeare Quarterly, Ernest Brennecke wrote:
There is plenty of fun in the lighthearted fantasy recently perpetrated by Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon. Their book is irresponsible, irreverent, impudent, anachronistic, undocumented. The authors warn all scholars that it is also "fundamentally unsound." Poppycock! It is one of the soundest of recent jobs. The more the reader knows about Shakespeare and his England, the more chuckles and laughs he will get out of the book. It is erudite, informed, and imaginative. It solves finally the question of the "second-best" bed, Raleigh's curious obsession with cloaks, Henslowe's passion for burning down Burbage's theatres, and Shakespeare's meticulous care for his spelling.[13]
Brahms and Simon made radio dramatisations of Don't, Mr. Disraeli! (1943) and A Bullet in the Ballet (1945); Brahms later adapted Trottie True for radio (1955).[5] Brahms and Simon co-wrote the screenplay for the 1948 film One Night With You,[5] and Trottie True was adapted for the cinema in 1949.[14] Their Tudor novel, No Bed for Bacon, was dramatised for the theatre after Simon's death by Brahms and the young Ned Sherrin, with music by Malcolm Williamson and staged in 1959.[15]
At the same time as his collaboration with Brahms, Simon (better known only as 'Skid' in the bridge world)[16]) became celebrated as a bridge player, competing in the European Team Championship in 1939 and winning it in 1948, a month before his death.[17] He won the Gold Cup twice (1937 and 1947), the National Pairs (1939), and played for England in the Camrose home internationals on six occasions, all victories. Together with Jack Marx, Simon was the inventor of the Acol bidding system; he was author of the classic[18] Why You Lose at Bridge (1945).[17] Its sequel Cut for Partners (1950) and a book on the principles of Acol, Design For Bidding (1949) were published posthumously. He was bridge correspondent of The Observer, the London Evening News and Punch.
He taught his team-mates to play and to laugh... Skid lived to the age of 44 – by a series of miracles. He crossed the busiest street, nose buried in a book. He dismounted from buses travelling at full speed, nose still buried in a book. He once walked through a plate glass window during a Telegraph final ... In his books, on the radio, at the bridge table, he guyed everybody. Most of all he guyed himself ... He was the greatest character to adorn the bridge world.—Maurice Harrison-Gray, contemporary British bridge professional, Hasenson, p. 135.
Simon married Carmel Withers, herself a silver medalist at the 1948 European Bridge Championships.[19] He died suddenly in London at the age of 44.[17] His widow died suddenly a year later, aged 40.[20] Simon left two bridge books in manuscript which were posthumously published. Caryl Brahms edited and completed their one unpublished joint work of fiction, published after his death.[1]