Fishing lines: Floods, tigers, smugglers, and the odd trout

John Bailey lives the angler's dream. While others scrimp to pay for mortgages, school fees, water rates and all the paraphernalia of staying afloat, Bailey drifts along, mercifully unencumbered by life's baggage.

He fishes when and where he wants, then makes money by writing about doing what he enjoys. Those who have to mow lawns or clean the attic before snatching a few hours on a river bank tend to condemn this butterfly lifestyle. Anyone having that much fun must be a parasite, a dolt or a scoundrel, they reason bitterly.

Bailey is none of these. He is one of those rare people who doesn't need to be surrounded with reassurances of his own importance. He lives in a rented cottage in Norfolk. He probably doesn't even own copies of the 30 or so books he's written. Excellent though most of them are, they are merely his means to explore distant places where big or exotic fish might live.

This makes him sound a bit of a loony. He isn't. He is an excellent raconteur, generous with time and money, and a terrific angler. He runs trips for fishermen to places such as Mongolia, Sweden and Greenland and his prime efforts are ensuring that others catch fish, though he must be itching to grab the rod and show them how.

Still, this is all the stuff of great campside stories, and that's precisely what his latest book, Trout at Ten Thousand Feet, consists of. Until now, Bailey has given only tantalising glimpses of what a fine writer he can be. He's a superb photographer, and it's as if previously he's been letting his camera do the hard work. Instead, in his new book there are only line drawings. Words become pictures. The result is the best thing he's ever written.

His text sparkles like a Kashmir trout river. It helps that his excursions get him tangled in events that most only dream, or maybe have nightmares, about. Murder, rape, smugglers, prostitutes, plane crashes, head-hunters, tigers, bears, wolves, floods: he's got some pretty good subject matter to work with. But he tells it so well.

There's a lot more philosophising than you usually find in a Bailey book. "Even though I might be seen as pathetic, liberal, bourgeois and self-serving," he muses, "I do know this: a ghillie in Ireland, a river watcher in Kashmir, a water bailiff in Yugoslavia cares more for the safety of his family, the prosperity of his village and the fatness of his trout than he does for a thousand pronouncements by politicians.

"The only sharp steel he likes to feel is the tip of a fishing hook. The only army officer he wants to meet is retired or off-duty, with a rod and not a rifle in his hand."

This book makes you want to pack up and go there at once. But you might think twice. His stories are not sanitised. Maybe it's better to leave it to the bold of heart, those like Bailey who think one glimpse of a sea-going taimen is worth all the pain, discomfort, danger and possible death.

'Trout at Ten Thousand Feet' by John Bailey, £12.99 (New Holland)