Who am I? – Philippe Dylewski

Hello. My name is Philippe Dylewski. I trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Obviously, this was the wrong professional orientation, as I soon discovered that I lacked patience with my first patients.

At the time, I was working for the Youth Protection Agency and at the same time launching a freelance recruitment business. This latter activity went well and I tried my luck full-time. I set up my first company at the age of 23. The company grows, opens 3 offices and employs around twenty people before I realize that I spend most of my day looking at a crack in the ceiling. It’s time to leave, after 15 years. As luck would have it, I have the opportunity to sell, and goodbye everyone.

I still work as a trainer and coach in workplace safety, a job I’m really passionate about because it makes sense and the methods I use produce results in the field.

I see a series on TV where a guy’s job is to find heirs for notaries and lawyers, and it’s love at first sight! I want to do that. I don’t even know if it really exists. Yes, it does, and two years later, I’m officially a private detective. The only problem is, after two years of lessons, I know absolutely nothing about it. I haven’t acquired any skills. I start writing a manual for my own use. Initially, my aim is simply to acquire skills in my new profession. When it’s finished, it looks like a book, and I send emails to all the French publishers. It will be published in 2009 by L’Express under the title “Confessions d’un privé”.

I didn’t write anything else for years, then in my spare time I wrote a silly and nasty book, “Comment pourir la vie de son patron” (“How to make your boss’s life miserable”), which was published by Fayard. I can’t believe it.

A few years later, I wrote a novel with my friend Saphir Essiaf, “24 heures héro”, about a day and a night in the life of two drug addicts on the road. It was published by Editions du Nouveau Monde.

It’s the COVID that’s really going to change my life. When the airports close, I’m on holiday in Thailand. I was supposed to stay there for three weeks, but ended up spending 4 years. Soon out of money, I set up this website, stillmissing.eu, which brings together the skills of detectives from all over the world who specialize in finding people. It works! And as my first book is copyright-free, I get it back and rewrite it entirely. It’s going to be “Le Renseignement Offensif”, which is a huge success and has already been republished and updated three times since 2020.

Since then, I haven’t stopped. Oh yes, I left Thailand to settle in Cambodia in the spring of 2024.