The Boffin Novelist

His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin
by Derek Collett
SilverWood, 2015, 455 pages, £11.99

Between 1942 and 1945 Nigel Balchin (pronounced bol-chin) wrote three novels that propelled him into the ranks of the top British novelists: Darkness Falls from the Air, The Small Back Room and Mine Own Executioner. They broke new ground in putting the hero’s day-to-day work at the forefront of the action: respectively, a senior public servant trying to co-ordinate industrial production in the early stages of the war; a scientist in wartime weapons research; and a psychiatrist practising without a medical degree. Slightly below the hero’s work in prominence in each novel is, on one hand, his private life, especially the troubles that stem from his inability to understand his wife or girlfriend, as well as, on the other hand, the ever-present threat of the war (in Mine Own Executioner the war is nearing its end, but the psychiatrist’s chief case concerns a veteran’s horrors and their possible consequences).

Balchin wrote these novels in a style that had the urgency and economy of a witness statement. Each novel has a breathtaking climactic scene with the hero at the centre (respectively, in a collapsing building during the Blitz searching for his wife; on a beach trying to defuse a German booby-trap bomb; and on the ledge of a tall building trying to talk his patient out of jumping). But they are not just well-written thrillers. Each character, even the minor ones depicted with only a few lines of dialogue, stands out as an individual, while the subtle humour, based on this deft characterisation, is often hilarious. And Balchin’s observations of the world of work—the tensions, the fears and ambitions, the politics, and especially the committee meetings, which inspire some of his funniest and most acerbic writing—are brilliant.

Readers and reviewers had great hopes for Balchin, who was at the time in his thirties. But for a number of reasons his subsequent output was patchy, and tailed off to insignificance in his final years, before his death in 1970 at the age of sixty-one.

As a fan of Balchin’s, I was hoping the centenary of his birth in 2008 would be marked by a biography. But apart from a radio program on the BBC, there was nothing. Derek Collett, an Englishman who became interested in Balchin through reading his novels and was disappointed to be able to find out so little about him, has spent several years researching Balchin’s life, interviewing surviving family members and acquaintances, and delving into archives and files.

Balchin grew up in a farming family in Wiltshire and won an agricultural scholarship to Oxford University, where one of his friends was the future movie star James Mason. Balchin discarded his regional accent, and instead of pursuing life on the land he switched to his great area of interest, industrial psychology. In one assignment for his degree he studied farm workers hoeing a field of kale, and found that they almost doubled their output when given the financial incentive to do so.

After graduating he went to work as an investigator for the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, a government body that, for a fee, lent its staff and resources to companies who wanted to improve their efficiency. This work went deeper than the sometimes ruthless “time-and-motion” studies of the period. Balchin was interested in the factors that gave people satisfaction in their work. When one hardened old industrialist grumbled that Balchin would be recommending cushions for his workers next, Balchin responded that if it made the workers happier and more productive, why not?

One of his lasting achievements in this period came from a stint with Rowntrees. Balchin studied the buyers of boxes of chocolates, and found that most of them were men, buying for women, and the boxes bore what we now know as “chocolate box” illustrations—sentimental, highly coloured pictures of children and puppies and flowers. Balchin came up with the idea of a plain, elegant black box, which appealed to men as well as women, and was also much cheaper to produce. The Black Magic box, still produced today, is one of the longest success stories of commercial design.

He wrote a column for Punch, in that magazine’s whimsical upper-middle-class vein, about business and industry from the inside, which he later collected and published under the title How to Run a Bassoon Factory. He married, and began writing novels. Unwisely, he tried to combine the two, by writing his first novel during and after his honeymoon. Neither his three early novels nor the marriage succeeded.

The Second World War galvanised his writing. Balchin later said he improved as a writer with his wartime novels because they were “written under the great emotional pressure of the war. They were much less calm—in fact, not calm at all—and they were concerned with things I felt passionately about.” He tightened his prose, discarding all but the essentials.

While writing his novels Balchin also served the war effort with distinction, though not in combat. One of his achievements was to transform the haphazard way in which men were allocated to military units. Inordinate numbers of men had been found to be unsuited to the duties to which they were assigned. Drawing on his experience in industrial psychology, Balchin used punch-cards to devise a system of fitting men’s capabilities with the requirements of their duties. It sounds obvious, but at the time it was revolutionary, and led to a great improvement in efficiency. By the end of the war Balchin was Deputy Scientific Adviser to the Army Council, with the rank of brigadier.

Then five things combined to throw him off course. First, the end of the war brought to an end the most stimulating and important work he would ever do. The long hours of wartime work and the novel-writing seemed to spark each other. Like many in Britain who lived through the war as adults, especially those not at the front lines, he later looked back on the war as the best time of his life.

Second, his literary success made it possible for him to write full-time. Despite his expressed contempt for “literary gents” and his belief that a writer needs a job unconnected with writing, he chose, not for the only time in his life, to ignore his own good advice, and thus lost the direct connection with the world of work that had made his three wartime novels so compelling.

Third, he decided to try writing something entirely different. His next novel, Lord, I Was Afraid, is a slightly surreal meditation on the state of modern man, written in the form of an unperformable 300-page play. His next novel after that, The Borgia Testament, is the imagined apologia of Cesare Borgia as he faces his death, closely following history and embellishing it with Balchin’s look inside the mind of one of history’s most infamous villains. While competently and conscientiously done, the novel is handicapped by the need to include an indigestible amount of historical fact at the expense of artistic freedom. Neither book sold well; he lost the goodwill of most of the readership he had just built up.

Fourth, his marriage declined, helped on its way by his philandering and an experiment in spouse-swapping with a couple of friends. His wife decided she preferred the other man, and left Balchin for him, taking their three children.

Fifth, he started to drink. He had hardly touched alcohol until the war years, but soon, with every part of his life deteriorating, he began to drink heavily, and eventually became an alcoholic, leading to his early death.

Nothing in his life was ever quite as good as it had been during his brief years at his artistic peak. He married again, but his relationship with his new wife, Yovanka Tomich, a young refugee from Yugoslavia with whom he had two children, was stormy. He continued to write novels, some of which, such as The Fall of the Sparrow and The Way Through the Wood (later filmed as Separate Lies) were among his best. But the gaps between the novels grew, and they ended in the late 1960s with the half-hearted Kings of Infinite Space, which he had written with the encouragement of NASA.

Having successfully scripted the film adaptation of Mine Own Executioner in 1947, he worked on some more films in Britain, winning awards for his screenplays for Mandy and The Man Who Never Was. In the mid-1950s he accepted an offer from Hollywood, where for a few years he made enormous amounts of money but produced nothing of note. He wrote the first script for the notoriously expensive flop Cleopatra, but little of it was used in the final version.

Derek Collett has written an eminently readable biography from start to finish. While he retains his sympathy for Balchin, he faces Balchin’s many faults calmly and squarely. He has managed to make the chapters recounting Balchin’s years of decline enjoyable to read, despite Balchin becoming less and less likeable and ending up a sodden, pathetic wreck. Collett has extensively interviewed Balchin’s widow Yovanka, whose memories illuminate and lighten the later years.

Collett’s work has unearthed the sort of facts one hopes to find in a biography. For example, Balchin was a good friend of a couple, Eric and Dorrie Stein, and their little son Ricky, who has since become a famous television chef. Collett found that Balchin had played minor counties cricket for Wiltshire, and argues that he therefore ranks third among literary figures behind Arthur Conan Doyle and Samuel Beckett (who both briefly appeared in first-class matches) in cricketing achievement.

Collett also dispels some myths. Balchin’s success at Rowntrees led to legends about his achievements there; Collett shows that widely believed claims that Balchin invented the Aero bar and named the Kit-Kat bar are untrue. Another widespread but false belief about Balchin is that he either invented or popularised the word boffin in The Small Back Room, his novel about boffins, which in fact does not include the word.

Collett’s final word is to argue that Balchin is “among the finest popular novelists that Britain has ever produced” and that his work deserves to be “widely known and enjoyed again, as it was seventy years ago”. I agree with those assertions—which fortunately can readily be tested, as some of Balchin’s novels have been republished recently, while most others are available inexpensively second-hand. Similarly gifted contemporaries of Balchin such as Eric Ambler and Josephine Tey continue to attract new and old readers. A large-scale Balchin revival seems unlikely, but perhaps Collett’s book will help to connect a few grateful readers with some fine novels.

George Thomas is deputy editor of Quadrant.