His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin

by Derek Collett

Never previously the subject of a biography, Balchin was not only a brilliant novelist and BAFTA-winning screenwriter: he was also largely responsible for the success of Black Magic chocolates. Yet his alcoholism and tormented love life ensured that his writing became increasingly uneven. Like Patrick Hamilton before him, Balchin drifted into obscurity but his compelling novels continue to be rediscovered by a new generation of fans, including Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes and best-selling author Philippa Gregory. Derek Collett's groundbreaking biography fills an important gap in the history of twentieth century fiction.

455 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2015

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few people today will have heard of the novelist Nigel Balchin and yet when he died in 1970 he was featured in the leader column of the Guardian. During the 1940s and 50s Balchin had been a best selling English novelist, but by the time of his death his popularity had already declined and along with many others of the period he is now largely forgotten. Like A. J. Cronin and Nevil Shute before him, Balchin had a profession career before becoming a full-time writer, but unlike Cronin and Shute he did not achieve the prolonged period of success that his ability perhaps deserved. Derek Collett has written the first, and long overdue, biography of a fascinating man whose writing career started brightly but ultimately ended in disappointment.

Bachin's life as he moved from industrial psychologist, through service in the army and then on to a screenwriter in Hollywood and full-time novelist is examined in great detail. Collett called him 'the novelist of men at work', and he believes that being away from the world of work ultimately deprived Balchin of the ideas he needed to build his novels on, inspiration, which had originally made his work so popular. There was also the downward spiral created by the increasing rejection of his work leading to increased consumption of alcohol.

Collett has put a massive amount of research into this book. It is an intense read, which demands concentration but is ultimately very satisfying. I liked the inclusion of single page summaries of all fourteen of Balchin's novels. I now look forward to tracking down and reading these novels. I have no doubt that Collett's scholarly biography will reignite interest in the writing of an underrated novelist – surely the aim of any literary biographer. If you want to know about the life and work of Nigel Balchin, and perhaps wonder what could have been, then this is the book to read.

[Ben Bergonzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A biography of a neglected novelist who is very much one of my favourites because of the fluency of his dialogue, the concision of his descriptions, and the impartiality of his story telling. Collett provides an invaluable guide, immensely well-researched and well-informed, of how this extremely intelligent man from a lower middle class background came to excel in industry (the creator of the Black Magic chocolate brand), literature (Darkness Falls from the Air, The Small Back Room, Mine Own Executioner, and many more) and films (he won a BAFTA for The Man who Never Was). He then became the victim of his own success as a writer, forced by the demands of dull but lucrative film contracts to forsake his connection with industry. This decision, brought about through the financial responsibility for two wives and two sets of children, led, Collett argues, for him to lose much of the impetus for his writing career, a career in which he had been distinguished for his oustanding depictions of the world of work, the world of the office, laboratory or factory. He died in his early 60s, a heavy drinker and a frustrated man. The book is lucid, detailed and gripping, written from many first hand sources such as Balchin's surviving second wife. If there was one thing I was missing as I read, it was an evaluation of Balchin's place compared to his better-known contemporaries. For example Graham Greene who also writes concise and pacy accounts of moral dilemmas, is far more popular and better respected than Balchin, and I am not quite clear why this should be. I like Greene, but I do prefer Balchin's naturalism, his modesty in staying in the background and leaving the readers to observe his characters warts and all, rather than explicitly pointing up the moral lessons. Compare, for instance, Darkness Falls from the Air with Greene's The End of the Affair. I would be interested to know how this difference in reputation has come about. Scholarly books have been written about the literature of the 1940s (even my late father wrote one: Bernard Bergonzi, 'Wartime and Aftermath') and no mention is made of Nigel Balchin. Why??