A Bullet in the Ballet

This is Doris Caroline Abrahams; never heard of her, have you? Never mind, you will soon but first we are off to Venice.

We are at La Fenice watching La Traviata conducted by Herbert von Karajan, agonisingly slowly. In the interval we overhear an American woman, Aperol spritz in hand, hoping he will be murdered so that a better conductor can take the baton for the next Act. She’s Donna Leon and that remark launched her first Commissario Brunetti detective novel: Death at La Fenice. It was published in 1992, four years before the theatre was burned down again – first in 1774 and again in 1836.

Now, dear locked-down time traveller, skip back to July 1691: Co Galway and the Battle of Aughrim. The first Lord Bellew, of the first Creation, died of his wounds – a bullet in the belly.

Now, Round Britain Quiz contestant, what connects Doris, Donna’s detective story and John Bellew’s death? There’s a clue in the title: A Bullet in the Ballet.

Doris Abrahams isn’t the most magnificent monicker. But she changed her name to Caryl Brahms so her respectable, aspiration-able parents did not know she was a journalist and her readers might think she was a man.

Caryl was dance critic for The Daily Telegraph and collaborated with her friend SJ Simon to write a delicious confection; true to the genre but often very funny. Simon’s forte was Bridge, by the way. B in the B is about a dance company perhaps based on Sergei Diaghilev’s, denied by Doris/Caryl but she would, wouldn’t she? I think she and SJS had a lot of fun in the writing. Constance Lambert and James Agate have walk-on parts as themselves, Lord Beaverbrook is disguised as Lord Buttonhooke. It was published in 1937.

“A Bullet in the Ballet, had its genesis in a frivolous fantasy spun by the collaborators when Brahms was deputising 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.” (Wikipedia)

I once met Donna Leon, at St Paul’s School in Barnes. Of course I remember what she said – it was almost as good as meeting a minor member of the royal family – “What’s milk whistle?”  She is a Wagnerian and asked a mutual friend, bossily, to get tickets for The Albert. My friend thought perhaps it was a fringe opera company performing in a pub. It was The Ring at the Albert Hall, I explained.