cartoons. In 1930, Brahms published a volume of poems for children, The Moon on My Left, illustrated by Anna Zinkeisen. The Times Literary Supplement judged the verses to be in the tradition of A. A. Milne, "but the disciple's gift is too frequently spoiled by her lack of control. She uses too many capital letters, and too many exclamation marks, too many round O's in long chains, and she is too facetious". The reviewer quoted with approval an extract from one of her poems, a child's thoughts by candlelight: I like things round, I like the moon, And the smooth inside Of a silver spoon; I like pennies – And Sixpence too – I LIKE things round – Don't you? This was followed the next year by a second volume, Sung Before Six, published under a different pen-name, Oliver Linden. She reverted to her more familiar pseudonym for a third volume, Curiouser and Curiouser, published in 1932. Brahms and Simon 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 began to write comic thrillers in collaboration. The first, 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." Before the novel was complete, Brahms published her first prose book, Footnotes to the Ballet (1936), a symposium edited (or as the title page read "assembled") by Brahms, with