A FEW WEEKS AGO, the anti-man-about-town went international and found himself in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at a spectacular haunt fittingly called the Writer”s Club and Wine Bar. Owned by British expat Bob Tilley and his Thai wife, Tong, the place is a big draw for traveling scribes of all sorts.
You never know who you’ll run into. One day, someone will perch himself at the bar while working on a Lonely Planet Guide; the next day, a foreign correspondent might roll through town and stop in for a meal. All journalists are welcome. It’s essentially the unofficial press club of Chiang Mai. An ancient Underwood typewriter sits on the bar, and several books by local authors, including Tilley, can be seen behind a case on the wall.
Tilley himself is up there in years. He has exactly five decades of experience as a stringer, mostly in Europe during the Cold War era, scavenging for stories for any number of newspapers. Like any true freelancer, he was a mercenary of sorts, often working for whichever publication had the dough. He wrote both for serious papers like the Daily Telegraph and also for tabloids like the Sun and the Daily Mirror.
Now writing pocket-size books under the pen name Bob Andrews, he recently released the riotous No Mummy, No Money: Confessions of a Chequebook Journalist, in which he spills lurid details of the freelance stringer’s life. Self-published and available through his own outfit, the Writer’s Club Chiang Mai (www.chiangmaiwritersclub.com), the whole thing is exactly 100 pages, and one can easily blow through it in an hour.
The reader takes home a side-splitting snapshot of the more lucrative aspects of Tilley’s decades-long career: fabricating expense accounts, gate crashing, freeloading countless lunches at press conferences, simultaneously working for competing newspapers to pay the rent and phoning in stories from behind the Iron Curtain to clueless copy editors who can’t spell umlaut.
In one chapter, Andrews gets an assignment to track down a preacher’s daughter who had supposedly just slept with Mick Jagger. Another chapter explains a sting operation in which a bunch of British tabloid reporters were assigned to go to a bar in Germany and steal back an actual soccer ball from the 1966 World Cup Final, which was won by England. And there’s more than one brutally honest confession of how much cheating is really done when a writer lands a gig updating a travel guide and the pay isn’t enough to revisit the destination for as long as it takes to do the job right.
“There’s this popular belief that journalists must be the guardians of honesty and probity,” Tilley told me. “And we’re not—at least, not the ones I worked with. From my experience, we’re just a bunch of guys, and gals, trying to make a living while enjoying it.”
But the book is not just about hackery. The author sheds light on the adrenaline rush that comes with every phone call, every new assignment, every new investigative adventure into the unknown: “That phone call,” he writes, “however inconvenient, is an invitation to enter a world where anything can happen—and to enter it with complete immunity and impunity, equipped with press card and credit card, passport and overnight case, prebooked hotel rooms and hire cars, contacts waiting to welcome you and perhaps, if they’re pretty and you’re lucky, share your bed. There’s the narcotic buzz of not knowing where you’ll end up, whom you’ll meet, with whom you’ll be sharing your days and nights—and finally, the promise of applause for a job well done, the byline above a story you managed to unearth against all the odds.”
As I write this column—in a business class seat on a China Airlines flight from Bangkok to Taipei—I can safely say that I am inspired by this book. I see at least one of my future selves. Tilley says he is already at work on a revised version of No Mummy, No Money. “One of the additional chapters I shall be writing is ‘How to secure a business-class seat,'” he told me. “I wrote an article based on one or two experiences and Reader’s Digest used it!”
