Derek Collett writes about his quest to rehabilitate a famous novelist.

I’ve always enjoyed discovering authors outside the mainstream, those who have largely been forgotten by literary history. Nigel Balchin certainly fits into the ‘forgotten author’ category and in recent years I have been on a one-man mission to repopularize his work.

Balchin was genuinely famous in the 1940s and 1950s, when he appeared regularly on television and radio. He first came to prominence during World War Two when he wrote two very exciting thrillers, The Small Back Room and Mine Own Executioner, which both sold in huge quantities. Later on he branched out into screenwriting, ending up in Hollywood. Balchin won a BAFTA for his screenplay for the wartime espionage tale The Man Who Never Was and he also wrote some of the early scripts for the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton version of Cleopatra.

Long before becoming a full-time writer, Balchin had excelled as an industrial psychologist. His finest moment came in 1933 when he played a key role in the launch of Black Magic chocolates. Balchin coordinated an extensive market research project that determined which chocolates constituted the assortment and we also have him to thank for the Black Magic box, a simple but effective design that has come to be regarded as a classic.

I was working for a large publishing company in Oxford in the early 1990s when I first discovered Balchin’s work. Reading one of his novels on the train on my way home from the office was a good way to alleviate some of the stresses of my working day. Not much had ever been written about Balchin and so I started digging around in Oxford’s Westgate Library, trying to find out more about someone who seemed to be a bit of a mystery man. I found it frustrating that there wasn’t much about Balchin in reference books and that the information available was often inconsistent or incomplete. I wanted to know the whole story and decided that the only way to do so would be to undertake research for the first biography of Balchin.

I was living in Headington when I began my research. Finding the constant roar of the A40 unconducive to the intense concentration required, I moved to the quiet town of Charlbury on the edge of The Cotswolds in 2004 and that’s when the project really took off. As a non-motorist, having a mainline railway station on my doorstep was also a real boon and I took dozens of train journeys into Oxford to work at the Bodleian. I’ve run my own editorial business the whole time I’ve been working on this book, which explains why it has taken me so long—eleven years and counting—as the research trips had to be fitted in around my work deadlines.

I completed the first draft of my biography in 2012 but the struggle to get published had only just begun. I didn’t manage to attract a literary agent and the book was turned down by lots of publishing houses. Publishers told me that my work was very interesting and that I clearly had a great passion for my subject but it just wasn’t commercial enough. Not wanting all my hard work to go to waste, I teamed up with a self-publishing company to get my words into print. It’s hard to beat the thrill of opening a large cardboard box full of freshly printed books and seeing one’s own name on the front cover. It’s also deeply satisfying to know that I’ve used every ounce of my ability as a researcher and writer to tell the story of a fascinating and talented man, Nigel Balchin, who deserves to be much better known than he is.

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