OXFORDSHIRE man Derek Collett, 50, from Charlbury, has just published a book about Potterne novelist and scriptwriter Nigel Balchin.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Balchin was well known as a novelist in the country, with two of his novels, The Small Back Room and Mine Own Executioner, becoming bestsellers that were adapted for the silver screen. After proving successful Balchin then started adapting the work of others, winning a BAFTA for his script of the wartime spy thriller The Man Who Never Was.

After some time he ended up in Hollywood, working on the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor epic Cleopatra, which was the most expensive film made of its time.

Balchin, born and raised in Potterne, lived most of his life in the county. He was born on December 3, 1908. Before the end of the First World War, the Balchin family moved to West Lavington, where Nigel’s father established a bakery and Nigel began his education at Dauntsey Agricultural School.

Mr Collett said: “I first discovered Nigel Balchin’s work entirely by accident. I watched a TV drama on the BBC in 1990. About a year later I found a copy of the novel on which the TV series had been based – Never Come Back by John Mair – in my local bookshop and bought it. In the endpapers was a notice for another book that caught my eye – The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin. The blurb sounded promising and so I tracked down a copy, read it, liked it very much and proceeded to read all of Balchin’s other books.

“I decided to write a biography of Balchin in 2004. It took me a long time to complete the project because I had to work more or less full-time in the early years in order to pay the bills!

“I worked on the research for the book mostly in the evenings or at weekends and treated it as a sort of hobby at first.

"But in recent years my hobby seems to have turned inexorably into my job and so I now spend most of my time writing about Balchin and the day job (I work as a scientific editor and proofreader when time allows) has to take a back seat. Sometimes the bills don’t get paid.”

Further information on Nigel Balchin can be obtained from the following website: www.nigelmarlinbalchin.com.

Derek Collett is currently working on a biography of Balchin and any readers with information about Balchin’s early life in Wiltshire can email: backroomboy@talktalk.net Mr Collett’s book His Own Executioner is now available via Amazon, and ordering through Waterstones for £11.99 in paperback and £4.99 as an ebook.