English novelist who achieved great popularity with novels of men at work.

After studying natural science at the University of Cambridge, Balchin divided his time between research work in science and industry (as an industrial psychologist) and writing. During World War II he was deputy scientific adviser to the Army Council.

In The Small Back Room (1943), his best-known novel, Balchin describes the conversation, behaviour, and intrigues for position and power of the “backroom boys” with whom he worked during the war. Almost as successful is Mine Own Executioner (1945), a study of a psychiatrist unable to cure his own neuroses and of the tensions created in his marriage by his lack of self-confidence. The problems of the psychologically and physically disabled are a recurrent theme: the hero of A Sort of Traitors (1949) is a former pilot who has lost both arms; The Fall of a Sparrow (1955) explores the mental processes of a psychopath.