The Under-estimated Mr Balchin

I've written before about Nigel Balchin on this blog, and as a result I've entered into a very interesting correspondence with Derek Collett, whose biography of Balchin is about to be published. Derek has sent me a copy, and I'm a hundred pages in at the moment. The verdict so far is very positive -more at a later date. In the meantime, I invited Derek to tell us more about his work on Balchin, and here is his guest blog:

"In most fields of creative endeavour in which I am interested—painting, music, cinema, etc.—I tend to be attracted primarily to those artists who have been forgotten by the mainstream and are consequently hiding in the shadows, to the extent that the majority of the population are blissfully unaware of their existence. So it is with literature too and the novelist Nigel Balchin can certainly be described as a writer who has gone missing since his death in 1970—very few people remember him nowadays.

I discovered Balchin’s work entirely by accident. In the early 1990s I had the good fortune to watch an enthralling three-part BBC Television drama. The novel from which this entertainment had been crafted was Never Come Back by John Mair. Is anyone still reading this superb 1941 political thriller these days? If not, then I can heartily recommend it. About a year after watching the TV series, I managed to find a copy of Never Come Back in my local bookshop. Nestling in the endpapers was a notice for another book that caught my eye—The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin. The blurb sounded promising: ‘As an account of the war experience, the book is realistic and unsettling, and as a study of a personality under stress, it reveals perennial truths.’ I quickly tracked down a copy of Balchin’s 1943 masterpiece, read it, loved it and proceeded to read all of his other books. Things snowballed from there and my quest to discover all that I could about Balchin has recently culminated with the publication of His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin, the first biography to have been devoted to this fascinating individual.

Like his friend, the painter and sculptor Michael Ayrton (the two men remained friends even after Ayrton had run off with Balchin’s wife), Balchin was a polymath. He succeeded not just as a novelist but also as an essayist, non-fiction and short-story writer, BAFTA-winning screenwriter, broadcaster and industrial psychologist (his crowning achievement in this sphere was playing a pivotal role in the introduction of Black Magic chocolates in 1933). During World War Two he excelled in the army, working first in personnel selection and then in Whitehall as a ‘boffin’. So impressive was he whilst clothed in khaki that he was made a brigadier. Even in his leisure hours, Balchin found the time to be a skilled woodcarver, a talented musician, an authority on subjects including Oriental rugs and Norse sagas and a gifted sportsman adept enough to have played Minor Counties cricket for his native Wiltshire in his youth.

Aware of the nature of the website on which I am kindly guesting, I should point out that there are some links between Balchin and the crime genre. He was an ardent admirer of Conan Doyle, remarking on one occasion that “I don’t read detective stories […] except Sherlock Holmes”, and I believe that a scene in his excellent 1945 novel Mine Own Executioner may well be an homage to the Holmes story The Sign of Four. Balchin wrote a screenplay for the interesting fog-bound thriller Twenty-Three Paces to Baker Street (1956), a film based on a novel by crime writer Philip MacDonald, and, thirteen years later, penned the script for a murder mystery of his own devising, Better Dead, which was the subject of a blog in this same corner of cyberspace last year. The custodian of this site has the advantage of me here because I have to confess that I have never seen Better Dead, my excuse being that I was still a grizzling toddler when it was broadcast during the Apollo-landing summer of 1969!

Balchin’s finest novels (Darkness Falls from the Air, The Small Back Room, Mine Own Executioner, A Sort of Traitors, Sundry Creditors and The Fall of the Sparrow) deserve to earn him a place in the literary hall of fame. If my biography of Balchin succeeds in dragging him out of the shadows in which he has been lurking for the last fifty years and pushing him back towards the edge of the mainstream then I will be delighted. He is definitely worthy of renewed attention.

His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin by Derek Collett is published by SilverWood Books on 1 September."

Yes, it was seeing Better Dead that sparked my own youthful interest in Balchin. Wish I could trace the script..I echo what Derek has said about Mair's book, by the way. 

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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Versatility

When I reviewed recently, for that splendid site Tangled Web UK, Michael Gilbert’s The Murder of Diana Devon, I reflected – not for the first time – on Gilbert’s remarkable versatility. That volume alone includes short stories, magazine competition puzzles, radio plays and a poem. Gilbert’s novels were many and various, and he also wrote for television, as well as creating four stage plays. He even found time to build a successful legal practice, his clients including Raymond Chandler.

There are some other writers of roughly comparable versatility. Francis Durbridge is a name that springs to mind. He achieved great success with his Paul Temple stories on the radio, and his television serials were hugely popular in their day (I’ve posted previously about my admiration for Bat out of Hell in particular.) He wrote numerous plays which had outings in the West End, and he was a prolific novelist – although oddly, I’d suggest, his novels tended to be less effective than his other work, because dialogue was his forte and characterisation and setting mattered much less to him.

Then there was Nigel Balchin, a fine novelist, who also wrote for stage and television, and had considerable success in the film world. He adapted Philip Macdonald’s The Nursemaid Who Disappeared for the silver screen, and arguably improved upon it. He even wrote, as I discovered recently, what Clive James describes as ‘the ur-text’ for Cleopatra.

But how many writers of today (especially in Britain) demonstrate comparable versatility? I’d love to write for radio, tv, film and stage, but unfortunately, I can’t see it happening in the near future. Producing novels and short stories is challenge enough (though I have bought a book on screenwriting, so who knows?). Has writing become more specialised – or am I simply overlooking the achievements of some great all-rounders of the present day?

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.

Forgotten Book - The Nursemaid who Disappeared

Philip Macdonald is a crime writer whose career spanned from the Golden Age to the post-war era, from 1920s London to Hollywood. He wrote some remarkable, if often slapdash, mysteries, and his gift for plot and suspense can be seen in his work on the brilliant screenplays for Rebecca and Forbidden Planet.

I could choose any one of a dozen Macdonald titles for my latest entry in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books, but today I’ve opted for The Nursemaid who Disappeared – also known as Warrant for X.

Sheldon Garrett overhears two people in a teashop, apparently planning a serious crime. Scotland Yard are not interested, so he approached Macdonald’s regular amateur sleuth, Anthony Gethryn, who uncovers a dastardly kidnapping plot.

It’s a lively thriller, rather than a conventional whodunit like the early Gethryns. The story was rather well filmed in 1956 (with Van Johnson as a blind protagonist) as 23 Paces to Baker Street. The movie had a much-changed story – and no Gethryn. Oddly, the screenplay was not written by Macdonald but by the even more accomplished Nigel Balchin. Balchin was a writer so fascinating that he deserves a post to himself one day. Maybe more than one.