Nigel Balchin and Better Dead

I can't quite believe it, but it seems to be more than five years since I last mentioned Nigel Balchin on this blog. At one time of day, Balchin was a big name, a high calibre writer who wasn't afraid to write commercial and popular fiction, and who seemed to reap the rewards. Yet nowadays he seems to be forgotten by most people. I guess the last time his name was in the spotlight was almost ten years ago, when Separate Lies was released - a film written and directed by Julian Fellowes, and based on Balchin's book The Way Through the Wood.

I've been interested in Balchin since my teens, and for a very specific reason. It so happened that by chance, when my parents were out, I watched a Saturday evening drama on television that was a detective story. I found it engrossing, and I was especially struck by the memorable final twist. The show was called Better Dead, and it was really a sort of Golden Age mystery, updated to the Sixties. Ron Moody, a wonderful actor, played the amateur sleuth. Because I was the sort of teenager who notices these things, I spotted on the credits that the play was written by Nigel Balchin (I know, teenagers shouldn't care about credits, but I always wanted to know about writers, not actors or celebrities...)

Having enjoyed Better Dead very much, I set out to find what else Balchin had written. A good friend of mine told me about a novel by Balchin that he happened to have read - the excellent Seen Dimly Before Dawn - and I soon discovered Balchin's masterpiece, The Small Back Room, a thriller about a bomb disposal expert, as well as other books like Darkness Falls From the Air. None of these, however, were whodunits, and after a while, I drifted away from Balchin, though I've always admired his writing.

In recent times, I've come into contact with Derek Collett, who  has set up an excellent website about Balchin, and has also written a biography of the author, which I very much hope will be published before too long - I'm dying to read it. I've quizzed Derek about Better Dead - he hasn't seen it, though he's shared with me what he knows about it - and I have started wondering if I'm the only person, after all these years, who has any memory of it. I now think that Balchin was toying with the idea of writing a Golden Age TV series featuring Moody's character - but it didn't happen, because he died, and in fact Better Dead seems to have been the last thing he wrote. What I'd really love to do is to track down the script - but it seems the family don't have a copy, and Anglia TV, which produced the original show, is no more. If any reader of this blog can point me in the right direction to find the screenplay, or more information about it, I'd be most grateful.

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Nigel Balchin

I mentioned Nigel Balchin recently, in relation to the screenplay he wrote for 23 Paces to Baker Street, a film adaptation of a thriller by Philip Macdonald. But Balchin’s screenwriting was a relatively minor aspect of his work. He was, in his day, a novelist of real distinction who often worked in or on the edge of the crime genre.

It’s often struck me how many novelists start their writing careers with rather improbable titles. Colin Dexter is one example, and my little tome Understanding Computer Contracts possibly takes a bit of beating in terms of quirky subject matter. But the title of Balchin’s debut was a classic oddity – published in 1934 under the name of Mark Spade, it was called How to Run a Bassoon Factory. (I think it was a satire…)

Balchin worked as a scientist, and also as an industrial psychologist. When he tried his hand at advertising, he is supposed to have popularised the Kit Kat brand of chocolate biscuit. His versatility is reflected in his writing. Although his most famous book is the war-time thriller The Small Back Room, other novels such as Mine Own Executioner and Darkness Falls From the Air were in much the same league in terms of quality.

Balchin seems to have had a tangled private life, and a wife-swapping episode resulted in divorce. One of his daughters is the childcare expert Penelope Leach, while another married John Hopkins, the screenwriter responsible for, among other things, Thunderball. He’s a writer who has fascinated me since my teens, and I’ll say more about his work in the future.