Cassell Military Classics: The Small Back Room

This excellent 1943 novel tells the story of a boffin in wartime. The tale is told in the first person by Sammy Rice. Having lost a foot between the wars (possibly as a result of a World War one injury though this is never stated), Sammy is spending the second world war working in the small back room of the title, studying possible weapons for the Army and trying to avoid getting sucked into noxious office politics. Because his girlfriend happens also to be his boss's secretary, Sammy has a good idea of all the games being played by his colleagues, but has no idea what to do about them. After the first part of the book describes the arguments within and between various research groups and bureaucrats within the ministry of defence, Balchin brings the reader in touch with a bump with the reality of the war they are fighting. Sammy has to interview a little boy who is the first surviving eye witness of a new type of Nazi booby-trap; which has just blown his sister to bits. While his superiors continue to fight their political battles, often with dire results, Sammy and one or two of his friends spend some of their time trying to work out how to protect people from these nasty little booby traps dropped by the Luftwaffe. And then Sammy and a colleague have a chance to put their theories about the booby traps into practice - by defusing two of them themselves ... The mine defusing scenes at the climax of the book are gripping and terrifying. The book as a whole is first rate, and you can see why John Betjeman described Nigel Balchin as a "readable writer of genius." Strongly recommended.

Sammy Rice is a low level scientist working for a government ministry in London at the beginning of the Second World War, when Hitler's bombs were raining down and carpeting the city, reducing large sections to rubble, and wounding, killing and maiming thousands of ordinary citizens. Rice's life has not been an easy one, among other things he has an artifical foot which doesn't fit very well, and when the pain becomes unbearable the only thing he can do is self-medicate with a bottle of whisky, while his long suffering girlfriend Susan, also an employee at the ministry, looks on aghast when he passes out night after night. Rice's life is further complicated by an infiniately byzantine office structure in which the hierarchy is always mysterious and invariably counterproductive. Established by Professor Mair from Oxford, who had been asked to start up a department of working scientists, Rice's ministry has come under attack by an outside council which seems to resent its autonomy. Every day is a little slice of hell. His expertise comes in handy when all over Britain a new, and deadly sort of bomb is spotted lying on the grass lawns of Derbyshire and the rocky beaches of Bath. Children think it it's a toy, they pick it up, and kablooey! So various are the pieces of the shrapnel that forensics trying to piece the bomb back together really has no idea of what one looks like and thus no idea of how to defuse it. Then one day, two bombs are found sitting side by side on the beach, and Sammy summons up his bottle to take the ultimate test of manhood. Balchin thus invented, way back in 1942, both the novel of forensics like CSI, and the novel of backbiting office politics, which we see in shows like OFFICE SPACE or the BBC TV comedy series THE OFFICE by Ricky Gervais. People think of Nigel Balchin as a third rate Graham Greene but he's more of a stylist than Greene, and more adventurous too. It's one of those books that gets under your skin and takes you down with it.