Searching for Stephen

Peter Houston tries – and fails – to track down an enigmatic author and the true story behind his effort to build a community around incompetence. Illustration by Viktoria Mladenovski

My search for Stephen Pile started on a less than perfect Saturday afternoon. I was lying on the couch nursing a crappy cold and watching Michael Portillo on the TV getting on and off some trains near where I grew up. On that damp squib of a Saturday, feeling defeated, the announcement of a Counterpoint issue focused on failure landed perfectly and I fired off my pitch:

‘In 1979, a man called Stephen Pile wrote The Book of Heroic Failures, the official handbook of The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. As its title suggests, the book tells the story of famous failures through history and the first edition had an application form to join the club. I would like to ask Stephen Pile about his book, his club and why it was a problem that 20,000 people applied to join.’

Every pitch ends with a go/no-go and, as you’re reading this, it was obviously a go. But before we get any further into this, I feel I need to manage your expectations: I failed. And not in any spectacular way. I failed with a whimper, not a bang.

This is not a sequel to Being Neil Armstrong, a documentary by Moondust author Andrew Smith, following his journey across America to try to meet the reclusive astronaut. He failed to interview the first human to set foot on the moon – but what a trip.

And it’s not Stay away from Mathew MacGill, a podcast tracing journalist Eric Mennel’s years-long obsession with a box of belongings found in a cabin in the Georgia woods. Eric couldn’t interview the owner of the box – he was dead – but he did uncover a narcissistic rollercoaster of a life story.

This story is just me trying to contact the author of a book most people have never heard of and not getting the interview. The narrative arc sweeps from my couch, with me surrounded by snotty tissues, to my desk, surrounded by the fug of disappointment that accompanies dozens of dead-end Google searches.

If that sounds interesting, well, thanks. You are my people. My starting point on this unheroic quest was Stephen Pile’s first book, ‘The Book of Heroic Failures’. A quick hunt on World of Books and I was delighted to discover that Stephen seems to have made quite a successful literary career writing books about failure. As well as the original book of Heroic Failures there are The Ultimate Book of Failures and the Not Terribly Good Book of Heroic Failures. Then there’s The Return of Heroic Failures, More Heroic Failures and a strange US reprint called Cannibals in the Cafeteria.

There might be others, but to be honest I lost track and decided to focus on the first book. Published in 1979, Heroic Failures is dedicated to everyone who has written a terrible book on how to succeed. Stephen wants them, and you, to know it’s perfectly all right to be incompetent and his chosen method is to chronicle outstanding failures throughout history.

‘Like what?’ you’re wondering. Well, like when the General Assembly of Indiana decided 4 was close enough for the value of Pi.

Then there was the boxer knocked out after just 10 and a half seconds, 10 seconds being the actual count. Or the family that kidnapped a stranger from the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport, mistaking him for their long-lost brother. And the death-row prisoner gaolers failed to hang three times. His sentence was commuted to life, but he was eventually released and immigrated to America where he lived happily for 16 years.

Heroic Failures is packed with these kinds of stories and is genuinely funny. As is the origin myth that accompanies its publication. The book was positioned as the official handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain, an organisation that at its peak is said to have had 200 members, all downright awful at something. The club no longer meets of course and its demise seems to start with Stephen having to resign as chair, because he super successfully prevented a tureen of soup being knocked over at a club lunch. Add to that the soaraway success of the book and the astonishing 20,000 applications to join and the club couldn’t possibly carry on.

Although you and I might not have heard of it, Heroic Failures spent a couple of years on the bestseller lists internationally. The first person I mentioned this article to had read and loved it. Over a very nice whisky on boat-hotel in London’s docklands, Singletrack publisher Mark Alker told me it’s one of the funniest books he’d ever read, doubling down on the Irish Times review that called it the the funniest book of 1980.

But none of this research was getting me any closer to speaking with Pile. Social media is where I find everyone I want to talk to these days, from primary school pals to adtech entrepreneurs. But there's nothing except for a Stephen Pile in New York who hasn’t tweeted since 2021, a baker and bond trader on LinkedIn and a namesake on Facebook who’d just bought himself a new tarantula.

One thing I did find was a post from the lady who worked with Stephen on Heroic Failures as a researcher. She’s retiring and clearing out her office and found a letter of recommendation from Stephen from 1984. It is one of the most generous letters of recommendation I have ever read, describing the researcher, unlike the subject of our book, as ‘completely competent’. Over the years, newspapers, magazines and radio shows have featured Heroic Failures and succeeded where I’ve failed and interviewed Stephen. From a Reddit ‘Today I Learned’ thread to the Toronto Star, a BBC Radio Two interview with Steve Wright to Mental Floss, every review of Stephen’s books glows.

But here’s the thing. Everything I’ve read or listened to about the story behind the publication of ‘Heroic Failures’ sounds the same. Word perfect. Like a Midsummer episode where the suspects have managed to get together before Barnaby arrives.

A club for failures whose President resigns for stopping the soup spilling, attracting too many members and selling too many books? It’s too good to be true. I have questions. Did the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain actually exist? Did it have 200 members and did they ever meet? Did they have soup? Did Stephen stop it spilling and did he have to resign?

I turned to Stephen’s current publishers to try to make contact and get some answers. The one thing I did manage to find online was his profile on the Faber & Faber website, But they wanted me to write an actual letter. I thought about it. I even typed it out. But my printer was playing up and it was raining and the postbox is easily 500 yards up the road and writing to Stephen’s publisher quickly became plan B.

His agent was more promising, if only because they were set up to receive electronic mail. I fired off an email asking for an interview. Within a couple of days I had a response.

Andrew Smith never got to meet Neil Armstrong, but he did get some emails. You can read them on the Moondust website.

All I got from Stephen’s agent was this: “Hi Peter – thank you for being in touch. Stephen Pile thanks you for thinking of him, however is unable to take this on. All my best, H.”

That was it for me. If Stephen Pile doesn’t want to talk to me, who am I to hound him or his representatives? If I’ve taken anything from this little quest it’s that it’s OK not to succeed. It’s perfectly all right to be incompetent.

Of course, none of this actually matters. Stephen’s books are funny in their own right and four decades on their origin story, real or mythical, is irrelevant. I really hope Stephen didn’t get in touch simply because he just didn’t want to.

I hope he is well and living in happy retirement and simply couldn’t be arsed answering any more questions about a series of books he started writing more than 40 years ago.

But, if by some quirk of fate you read this Stephen, I’d love to know if there really was soup?

My DMs are open.

Searching for Stephen was first published in our 2022 edition, The Failure Issue.