Diabelli Variations & The Orange Plot Mysteries

The Austrian composer & music publisher Anton Diabelli composed a waltz tune & invited 51 contemporary composers to contribute a variation on it. Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart's son & the then 8 year old Liszt were among those who contributed. Diabelli published the whole collection. But Beethoven, on his own, composed 33 variations on the theme, which are now known as the Diabelli Variations, & are more famous than the collection of the variations of the 51 composers.

During the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, the weekly magazine "Sunday Dispatch" commissioned six authors to write a story on the plot "One night a man picked up an orange in the street. This saved his life."

One of the six was Nicholas Blake, the pseudonym under which the Irish poet Cecil Day Lewis wrote detective fiction. The publisher, William Collins also contributed the last of the stories. All the six stories are published in book form for the first time in "Bodies from the library" Volume 3, selected & introduced by Tony Medawar.