Edition: Hogarth Press, 1986 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 875
The second Brahms and Simon collaboration is a sequel to A Bullet in the Ballet, and is once more a humorous murder mystery set in the chaotic Stroganov ballet company. The eternally optimistic Stroganov, seeing an advert for a casino for sale in a minor resort in the south of France, decides that his fortune is made. Buying it, he transfers his ballet company there and is immediately plunged into rivalry with the casino owned by the English Lord Buttonhooke.
There is very little difference between A Bullet in the Ballet and Casino for Sale. Both are amusing, affectionately ridiculing the pretensions of the edges of the professional ballet world; both are filled with eccentric caricatures; and both have a murder mystery entirely subsidiary to the humour. A Bullet in the Ballet is perhaps more consistently funny, but like one and you will like the other.
Showing posts with label S.J. Simon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label S.J. Simon. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 July 2001
Friday, 2 June 2000
Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon: You Were There (1950)
Edition: Michael Joseph, 1950
Review number: 517
Unusual though a book written to a large extent in the second person might be, You Were There fails for one major reason - I wasn't. Since the "there" in question is London in the twenties, you would now need to be at least eighty to remember the incidents the book mentions.
Apart from the second person gimmick, the style of the novel is like the far better known - and greatly superior - No Bed for Bacon and Don't Mr Disraeli. It is a humorous, 1066 and All That style take on historical events combined with a romantic plot. Here, however, the history is less amusing and the romance less interesting, and it is hardly surprising that You Were There is even frequently omitted from lists of Brahms and Simon novels at the front of reprints of others.
Review number: 517
Unusual though a book written to a large extent in the second person might be, You Were There fails for one major reason - I wasn't. Since the "there" in question is London in the twenties, you would now need to be at least eighty to remember the incidents the book mentions.
Apart from the second person gimmick, the style of the novel is like the far better known - and greatly superior - No Bed for Bacon and Don't Mr Disraeli. It is a humorous, 1066 and All That style take on historical events combined with a romantic plot. Here, however, the history is less amusing and the romance less interesting, and it is hardly surprising that You Were There is even frequently omitted from lists of Brahms and Simon novels at the front of reprints of others.
Friday, 22 January 1999
Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon: Don't Mr Disraeli (1940)
Edition: Hogarth, 1987
Review number: 192
This book is extremely like No Bed for Bacon, which was in fact written following the success of Don't Mr Disraeli. Indeed, the two have been printed in a single volume, under the title A Mutual Pair. The major difference is of course, that one is set in the Victorian age, the other in the Elizabethan.
Despite its greater success at the time, I think that Don't Mr Disraeli is less well-done than No Bed for Bacon. It has aged rather less well. This is because Don't Mr Disraeli, published almost sixty years ago, was written only forty years after the end of the period in which it was set, so that many of its readers would have been alive at the time; none of No Bed for Bacon's readers could possibly remember the sixteenth century. Compared to the average person living in 1940, our knowledge of the Victorian period will be much more sketchy, while our knowledge of the Elizabethan period will be reasonably similar. This means that references in Don't Mr Disraeli are more likely to be missed by or incomprehensible to modern readers (or, at least, take enough time to work out that the joke is spoiled), while those in No Bed for Bacon are more immediately funny.
Such plot as there is in Don't Mr Disraeli is a melodramatic version of the Romeo and Juliet theme, with the addition of a stage villain, all twirling moustachios. But the main point of the book is the series of silly anecdotes scattered through it, with no reference to their chronological order or connection to the main story (so, for example, scenes of the widowed queen precede others of her coronation). Disraeli keeps on making - or nearly making - errors, and is constantly corrected with the words of the novel's title. Just about everyone associated with Victorian England appears somewhere in the book, along with others who barely fit in (the Marx brothers, for example).
Review number: 192
This book is extremely like No Bed for Bacon, which was in fact written following the success of Don't Mr Disraeli. Indeed, the two have been printed in a single volume, under the title A Mutual Pair. The major difference is of course, that one is set in the Victorian age, the other in the Elizabethan.
Despite its greater success at the time, I think that Don't Mr Disraeli is less well-done than No Bed for Bacon. It has aged rather less well. This is because Don't Mr Disraeli, published almost sixty years ago, was written only forty years after the end of the period in which it was set, so that many of its readers would have been alive at the time; none of No Bed for Bacon's readers could possibly remember the sixteenth century. Compared to the average person living in 1940, our knowledge of the Victorian period will be much more sketchy, while our knowledge of the Elizabethan period will be reasonably similar. This means that references in Don't Mr Disraeli are more likely to be missed by or incomprehensible to modern readers (or, at least, take enough time to work out that the joke is spoiled), while those in No Bed for Bacon are more immediately funny.
Such plot as there is in Don't Mr Disraeli is a melodramatic version of the Romeo and Juliet theme, with the addition of a stage villain, all twirling moustachios. But the main point of the book is the series of silly anecdotes scattered through it, with no reference to their chronological order or connection to the main story (so, for example, scenes of the widowed queen precede others of her coronation). Disraeli keeps on making - or nearly making - errors, and is constantly corrected with the words of the novel's title. Just about everyone associated with Victorian England appears somewhere in the book, along with others who barely fit in (the Marx brothers, for example).
Monday, 28 September 1998
Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon: No Bed for Bacon (1941)
Edition: New English Library, 1964
Review number: 120
Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon wrote four humorous historical novels together; and this is probably both the silliest and funniest. They have taken a sort of general idea of the Elizabethan period, as though culled from second-rate popular histories and a good knowledge of the literature and stirred it all together as though everything in the period happened in a rush rather than during a reign of over forty years. Characters from the 1560s rub shoulders with others from the 1600s and later (playwrights right through until the closing of the theatres in the 1640s are often described as Elizabethan).
The plot is dominated by the two best known parts of Elizabethan society, the theatre and the court. Francis Bacon is desperate to be given a secondhand bed by the queen, a sign of great preferment. He commissions Shakespeare to write a play to be performed for the queen and court, to captivate her. (Shakespeare holds out for a fee of £40 when, as Bacon points out, you can get Beaumont and Fletcher for a ten pound note, and there are two of them.) Meanwhile, new lady-in-waiting Viola Compton has annoyed the queen by an accurate imitation of Mary Queen of Scots; she has discovered the stage. As in many stories dealing with the theatre of the time (I can think of two novels and a play without even trying), she disguises herself as a boy to become an actor in Shakespeare's company. (The commoness of the theme is probably because it is prompted by the many girls who disguise themselves as boys in Shakespeare's own plays.)
Across the town, the rival theatre company of Philip Henslowe sets out to destroy the Burtbages and Shakespeare, with various ham-fisted attempts to destroy their theatre: inciting the Puritans to close it down, sending out bravos to burn it - they get lost and burn down Henslowe's theatre instead, and finally sabotaging the props for a performance of Henry VIII. (In fact, the Globe did burn down after an accident with cannon in Henry VIII.)
It's the small touches that make this book so successful - the nightwatchman with ambition, Shakespeare's continual attempts to begin his masterpiece Love's Labour Won, Raleigh's potato tasting and so on. It helps if you know something about Elizabethan history and drama, but the novel is still riotously funny even if you don't know that much. The tone of the whole thing is a little like a student revue (up to including a "Warning to scholars: This book is fundamentally unsound" at the beginning), but it is a good student revue.
Review number: 120
Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon wrote four humorous historical novels together; and this is probably both the silliest and funniest. They have taken a sort of general idea of the Elizabethan period, as though culled from second-rate popular histories and a good knowledge of the literature and stirred it all together as though everything in the period happened in a rush rather than during a reign of over forty years. Characters from the 1560s rub shoulders with others from the 1600s and later (playwrights right through until the closing of the theatres in the 1640s are often described as Elizabethan).
The plot is dominated by the two best known parts of Elizabethan society, the theatre and the court. Francis Bacon is desperate to be given a secondhand bed by the queen, a sign of great preferment. He commissions Shakespeare to write a play to be performed for the queen and court, to captivate her. (Shakespeare holds out for a fee of £40 when, as Bacon points out, you can get Beaumont and Fletcher for a ten pound note, and there are two of them.) Meanwhile, new lady-in-waiting Viola Compton has annoyed the queen by an accurate imitation of Mary Queen of Scots; she has discovered the stage. As in many stories dealing with the theatre of the time (I can think of two novels and a play without even trying), she disguises herself as a boy to become an actor in Shakespeare's company. (The commoness of the theme is probably because it is prompted by the many girls who disguise themselves as boys in Shakespeare's own plays.)
Across the town, the rival theatre company of Philip Henslowe sets out to destroy the Burtbages and Shakespeare, with various ham-fisted attempts to destroy their theatre: inciting the Puritans to close it down, sending out bravos to burn it - they get lost and burn down Henslowe's theatre instead, and finally sabotaging the props for a performance of Henry VIII. (In fact, the Globe did burn down after an accident with cannon in Henry VIII.)
It's the small touches that make this book so successful - the nightwatchman with ambition, Shakespeare's continual attempts to begin his masterpiece Love's Labour Won, Raleigh's potato tasting and so on. It helps if you know something about Elizabethan history and drama, but the novel is still riotously funny even if you don't know that much. The tone of the whole thing is a little like a student revue (up to including a "Warning to scholars: This book is fundamentally unsound" at the beginning), but it is a good student revue.
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