Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, No. 1)

by Douglas Adams

Paperback, 1988

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Publication

Pocket (1988)

Description

The investigations of Dirk Gently, a private detective who is more interested in telekinesis, quantum mechanics and lunch than fiddling around with fingerprint powders, produce startling and unexpected results.

User reviews

LibraryThing member camillahoel

Everyone and his grandmother have now read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and those who haven't have seen the film or heard the radio show. They made Douglas Adams the icon he is, and ensured that my mother recognises his name. Dirk Gently, however, is more of an unknown entity in the world

of nutty literati and grandmothers alike. Rather undeservedly; it should be remedied.

Adams once wrote occasional episodes for the magnificent television series Doctor Who (and some of the better episodes at that). When, from time to time, the scripts did not pan out, he was known to convert them into pieces of books (see the Krikkit robots and the incident with the ashes, for example). Shada, which was left unfinished and unaired because of a strike, is one such, and Adams converted key bits of it into the strange composition of insanity, absurdity, hilarity and very, very close plotting which is Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

The Doctor does not figure in it. Instead the reader must deal with the strange workings of the very odd minds of Professor Chronotis (Reg), and his cryptic comments, very strange behaviour and impressive magic tricks; and Dirk Gently, with his very strange hat, penchant for massive amounts of free pizza, and his tendency to notice things. The hat is very strange.

Dirk Gently is a holistic detective, which means he will use his gifts to find the missing cat by visiting Bermuda -- for holistic reasons, you understand. And he never gets paid. And he went to school (and by "school" I mean Cambridge, as you do) with Richard. And was kicked out for correctly divining the correct questions of an exam. Down to the smallest comma. By accident.

Richard is more boring (despite having an interesting sofa), but serves as the hub around which all the crazy happens. You see, Adams takes The Interconnectedness of All Things very seriously. So a lot of crazy has to happen in order to reveal itself as interconnected. And it is strangely disorienting when you are in the middle of it. And then, two weeks after you put the book down, you go "Ah! Right! I get it now". Or that is what I suspect. The first time I read it I read it twice in two days because I need to know that things fit. And they did. I read it again, now, after 12 years or so (with very fuzzy memories from the last time), and it took me a while to stop going "ah, yes, that was why he included that bit" once I had finished the book.

There is a lot of technobabble. It is 1980s technobabble from Adams, which means it is weirdly mac-centered in a strange unworldly kind of way and may induce bouts of nostalgia in geeks (or, indeed, people who were old enough to know state of the art technology in 1987). Be warned.
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More importantly (as I see it), it pokes and prods literary and musical history in just the right places and will reward anyone familiar with key Coleridge poems. It might also help you appreciate Bach's Mass in B Minor from the Brandenburg Concertos in a new way.

And the extinction of the dodo is explained

It is very much a Douglas Adams book. The weirdly absurdist carnivalesque style and the perfect wording that makes apparent True Meanings of things and which are characteristic of a certain type of British writing -- it is all here. People who like it, will; those who don't … well, I can't help you.

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24 more

LibraryThing member isabelx

"What do a dear cat, a computer whiz-kid and an Electric Monk who believes the world is pink have in common?"

Very funny & highly recommended.

LibraryThing member bookworm12

Time travel, a detective agency, Dodo birds, ghosts, Electric monks; this book is a hodgepodge of sci-fi elements and the bizarre, which is to say it’s a novel by Douglas Adams.

I’m a huge fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and so I’ve been looking forward to this one for

years. To tell the truth I was a bit disappointed, although the book is hilarious it’s also a bit convoluted and hard to follow. It still has Adam’s trademark humor and pokes fun at the absurd, but it lacks the heart that you’ll find in Hitchhiker. I think that a big part of the reason why can be attributed to Arthur Dent’s absence. His bumbling humanness is what grounds the craziness of Hitchhiker. The main character in Dirk, Richard MacDuff, is similar to Arthur but he’s never quite as endearing.

It’s almost impossible to explain the premise of the book, but this line from it is as close as I can get …

“Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.” - Dirk Gently (also known as Svlad Cjelli).

One element that I loved was the idea of the Electric monks. People have created machines to do almost all of their menial tasks. We have dishwashers, microwaves, washing machines, etc. This novel takes it once step further, they’ve created robots called Electric monks to do their believing for them. It’s just one example of Adam’s brilliance.

“Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see?”

“If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.”

“The phone rang and Janice answered it. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, ‘Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr. Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber.’”

BOTTOM LINE: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the best place to start with Adam’s work. If you already love that series then definitely check this one out! It’s not quite up to the same standard, but nothing of Adam’s should be missed.

p.s. I have to mention one fantastic line that nods to Hitchhiker, “Do you always carry a towel around in your briefcase?”

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LibraryThing member teresa.elms

Satirical time travel story based on the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who figures in the plot at one point. Literate and funny.

LibraryThing member lavaturtle

This book is funny, and weird, and clever. After years of hanging around geeks who constantly repeat a few lines from Hitchhiker's Guide, I'd forgotten that Douglas Adams is actually quite funny! In this book, it's primarily dry humor about British life and academia. Everything ties up very neatly

by the end, which is satisfying for a light humorous book.

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LibraryThing member Narilka

DIRK GENTLY'S
HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY
We solve the whole crime
We find the whole person
Phone today for the whole solution to your problem
(Missing cats and messy divorces a specialty)

Dirk may be one of the most unique detectives of all time. He believes in the fundamental interconnectedness of all

things. This allows him not to do any work to solve his crimes, you know such things like using fingerprint powder or collecting actual evidence, because everything leads to everything else. Yeah, let that idea sink in for a minute. And somehow Adams makes it all work. There are some genuinely brilliant bits about mathematics and the nature of space-time in this short little novel. I particularly enjoyed the solution to the problem of the immovable sofa.

So why only three stars? I think this is one of those instances where the book was spoiled by seeing the tv show first. I absolutely love the new series starting Samuel Barnett and Elija Woods and I can definitely see how the writers were influenced by Adams' work. At the end of the first season I had one of those moments where the light-bulb went off and "OMG it's all connected!" that was so cool. Since I kind of knew what to expect I think the book's ending was robbed of its impact. But it does all work, everything really is connected. Adams is a mad genius.

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LibraryThing member benfulton

Adams' goals for this book are lofty. He attempts to imbue certain poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with clues to not only the origin of life, but possibly also its destruction. He explains the survival of the coelacanth, and the genius of J.S. Bach. He does this with a neat trick, that I can't

really remember seeing in any other book: he starts his characters in an alternate universe, and has them go back in time and change the world so that it becomes our world. It's clever, but the issues he attempts to clear up with his trick are, interestingly, not those tackled by a typical time travel writer. Hitler is not covered. Area 51 is not even mentioned. Adams is interested in explaining the mysteries of art, not war. In this he anticipates the Da Vinci Code in a way (although Adams' plot is his own work and not a ripoff of another book, and Adams' book is much better written).

It has its weaknesses, of course, but I think any book about time travel asks for those. "Why didn't they just travel back in time and do X?" the readers cry. I'm sure there were very good answers to all those questions, so I can't help but wonder what we would have seen if Douglas Adams had survived for another few decades. Hitchhiker's is of course brilliant, but the sequels mostly just got sillier. This first book about Dirk is hugely underrated, but the sequel with the lovely title, "The Long, Dark, Teatime of the Soul", doesn't hold up as well. Would he have recovered the brilliance?

Regardless, the world lost a wonderful author when Douglas Adams died, and this book is both a worthy memorial and a demonstration of why.

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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand

It's hard not to imagine that readers that know Douglas Adams only from his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series will come away from "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" a bit disappointed. The laughs don't come as fast here, the universe that Adams describes doesn't feel as huge and

wild. "Dirk Gently" is really a much more sedate affair: unlike the "Hitchhiker" books, jokes, one-liners, and philosophical musings don't feel like they're fighting each other for space. Adams takes his time describing his settings and sketching out his characters, and book's plot could almost be described, in places, as "slow": it's almost as if Adams, who'd already sold a lot of books, were trying to prove that he could also write a "real" novel, not just a book-length comedy script. If that was his reason for writing "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," he succeeded. While this one isn't as much fun as his earlier work, Adams still manages to talk about big ideas -- space-time, causality, the interconnectedness of all things -- with a deft, light touch. It successfully satirizes superannuated Cambridge dons, the software industry and, in a sense, the detective novel in general. Adams's dialogue is still a shade too clever: his characters' insults and expressions always seem to hit the mark a bit too perfectly. At the same time, the author still manages to make them seem believable as people, which is no mean feat. It takes a pretty good writer -- of any genre -- to pull that off.

This seems particularly worth mentioning since "Dirk Gently" might be thought of as a book-length reveal of one of its least likable characters, Michael Wenton-Weakes. The title character is the book's focal point and obvious star, a jobbing, low-rent spacetime-roving private eye that'll seem pretty familiar to "Dr. Who" viewers. Still, I was impressed that much of the book's plot could be said to turn on its antagonist's character, rather than his actions. I wasn't quite expecting Adams to take such a literary approach, and was impressed that he tied things up the way he did. Lastly, I also liked this one because it felt simultaneously close, in cultural and temporal terms, and rather far away. To say that "Dirk Gently" is a prime exercise in British eccentricity is putting it mildly. But, even though it discusses PC software and car phones, it's a sort Britishness that precedes the wave of globalization that washed over the planet in the last decade or so of the twentieth century and may not be available to even the most anti-EU Briton today. And even here, we see real estate agents looking for disused buildings in run-down areas of London to turn into pricey residential spaces. So close, but yet so far away. Not a great book, but recommended to avowed fans of Douglas Adams and to fans of humorous writing in general.

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LibraryThing member PilgrimJess

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we not eff it after all."

This book is Douglas Adams' take on detective fiction in which Sherlock Holmes meets Doctor Who, quantum theory meets time travel.

As with many detective

stories this book features a murder and all evidence seems to point to an innocent man, Richard. Enter the rather shady Dirk Gently, ex Cambridge undergraduate, last seen in police custody some years previously, now running a holistic detective agency. Holistic because it is based on the interconnectedness of all things, any event in the space-time continuum can connect to any other. Adams therefore assembles a wonderfully madcap collection of people, things and events, and weaves them into this imaginatively playful romp. Normally TOO MANY coincidences would have the reader rolling their eyes with frustration but here it just seems to work, it's fun to see what gets linked together.

Now I'm sure that this is a Marmite book, you will either love or loathe it. If you enjoyed Adams whimsical style in his better known 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' then you are already well on the road to enjoying this one, if not, then it's unlikely to convert you. Personally, whilst I didn't actually laugh out loud, I found it a very clever piece of writing that left me with a smile on my face and that as far as I'm concerned can be no bad thing.

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LibraryThing member elenchus

Took this re-read as an opportunity to see if Adams had done more with genre tropes than I detected the first time through. I've read appreciably more hardboiled and detective fiction than I had when this was published.

Adams follows a noir plot the way MST3000 followed a B-movie plot: commenting

on plot and random details alike, at a leisurely and relaxed pace, and seems content to draw amusement from that. Rather than the shamus's patter distracting the reader, Adams uses the avalanche of seemingly unconnected ideas to do the same. Apart from that, I didn't find evidence I'd missed any clever bits.

Some of those ideas:
- Sofa stuck on stair in a mathematically impossible configuration
- Wayforward Technologies & converting data into music (classic dual themes of military adaptation & Japanese corporate interest)
- Electric Monk, alien AI designed to believe (or at least: exhibit behavior of someone who believes); apparently counterpoint to humanity, which rather needs algorithms to bolster thinking
- An explanation for Coleridge's inability to recall the entirety of the dream inspiring his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

I hadn't retained any detail to speak of, neither plot nor set pieces. Enjoyable this time, uncertain whether to keep the books for another read, or purge. Definitely motivated me to re-read the sequel, which I did directly.

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LibraryThing member Ambrosia4

The lesser known counterpart of Adams' earlier "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" displays the authors distinctive style of random observation and winding plot. As with all his books, his quirky writing style works well for his own genre blend of

science fiction, philosophy, and humor. This is a book that makes you work for it's meaning and leaves you feeling like you've had an epiphany.

Particularly enjoyable are the title character's foibles and crazy ideas on the "interconnectedness of all things". While overall amusing and entertaining, Adams makes you think at the same time as you laugh.

I enjoyed this book greatly and believe it well deserved it's place on the 1001 Books to Read list.

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LibraryThing member Anbigin

Electric Monks, hypnotism, ghosts, salt shaker magic tricks, old college professors, a music magazine and then a dodo bird - what do they all have in common? I don't know - that's why I read this book. It wasn't as comedic as "Hitchhiker's" but obviously still fun. Highly enjoyable, good characters

and amazingly random:)

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LibraryThing member craso

How do I describe this novel? A humorous new age detective story with a time machine and a ghost… actually two ghosts? How about Douglas Adam at his best?

Richard is having a bad day. He stands up his girlfriend to go to a stuffy dinner at Cambridge with his old student adviser Reg who for some

reason has a horse in his bathroom. As he is driving home he runs into the ghost of his boss. He says something stupid on his girlfriend’s message recorder and scales the side of her apartment building to retrieve the tape. This is not normal behavior for Richard and Dirk Gently, an old friend of Richards from Cambridge, wants to know why he is acting out of character. Seems Dirk has a Holistic Detective Agency where he claims to find the “whole solution to your problem.” Adam’s injects New Age philosophies into this genre bending story. More down to earth than the Hitchhiker novels, but infused with the same humor, this book was great fun to read.

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LibraryThing member Dickon.Edwards

Slight spoilers!

Not quite as stuffed with jokes and dazzling flights of the imagination as the Hitchhiker's Guide novels, but there's still plenty to enjoy here. There's the brilliant idea of the Electric Monk, the simple comedy of a bored horse found in unlikely places (an idea later used by

Steven Moffat in one of his Doctor Who episodes - he confirms this somewhere), a very clever idea to do with Coleridge and time-travelling, a sad human ghost trying to work out what he's meant to do with himself, an ambiguously motivated ghost of an alien engineer, a dodo, a stuck sofa, and best of all the rumpled super-detective that is Dirk Gently himself.

It's worth remarking that, when Dirk G as a character was dramatised by the BBC for radio and then TV, the plot of this novel was, respectively, first heavily simplified then mostly ignored. It IS a bit of a crossword puzzle of a story, and a reader looking to be properly satisfied after finishing the book might want to either re-read it at once or go online and find a fan's FAQ.

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LibraryThing member SandDune

Recognise this?

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Or this?

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea

Well, any readers of [Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency] who are not

familiar with either of the poems by Coleridge that those verses come from may struggle a little with the plot! Actually the more I think about it, even if you are familiar with those poems (which I was), and the significance of the 'man from Porlock' in the writing of Kubla Khan (which I also was) then you might struggle a little with the plot (which I did). But it's all good fun.

Richard MacDuff ends a dinner engagement at his old Cambridge College, with the sinking realisation that he had also invited his long suffering girlfriend Susan Way, but forgotten to pick her up. And then he has compounded his guilt by inviting her for a romantic weekend away which he realises as soon as he puts the phone down is impossible due to the pressure of work being put on him by his boss (and Susan's brother) Gordon Way. But is climbing up to Susan's third floor flat via a rickety drainpipe (just to remove the message tape from her phone) really the work of a rationale man, and something that the normally sensible Richard would do? And why does Richard apparently see the irascible Gordon Way jump in front of his car when Gordon has seemingly been murdered hours earlier. A case that obviously calls for the talents of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective agency, run by Richard's old college friend Dirk Gently (or rather Svlad Cjelli as he was known before he was hauled off from the college in a police car and aquired the sort of notoriety which made changing his name a sensible option).

A good read this, if one that is dated by the number of references to the technology of the 1980's when it was written.

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LibraryThing member datrappert

This books starts slowly, weaving several plot threads together in what the reader hopes will become an entertaining story, but it never really gels. It is difficult to care very much about the characters. The story's main protagonist, a computer software writer, is never fully fleshed out, and the

title character, Dirk Gently, remains a bit of an enigma. Adams seems more interested in putting forth his ideas about music, belief, time travel, and a few other subjects. These are often interesting, but don't make up for the lack of an urgent plot or for the books truly sloppy ending. Most importantly, the books just isn't that funny. True, it has an amusing tone, and Mr. Adams would have undoubtedly been a great guy to lift a few pints with, but there are no belly laughs, and some of what humor there is seems forced. Truly disappointing, although it does contain an interesting twist at the end that is easy to miss if you're not paying attention. In its favor, the book will encourage people to read Coleridge!

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LibraryThing member scribe14

What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an Electric Monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a Chronologist over 200 years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common? Apparently not much; until Dirk Gently, self-styled private investigator, sets out to prove the

fundamental. interconnectedness of all things by solving a mysterious murder, assisting a mysterious professor, unravelling a mysterious mystery, and eating a lot of pizza - not to mention saving the entire human race from extinction along the way (at no extra cost).

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LibraryThing member bexaplex

A private investigator attempts to solve the meaning of all things, especially those things that he wasn't hired to investigate.

There are strands of something interesting in this book, but they don't stick together in any meaningful way. The title character doesn't appear until nearly halfway

through the book, at which point the focus totally changes from the first half of the book and Gordon Way, and never really returns. The plot twist at the end is completely unsatisfying: a bunch of seemingly unrelated characters end up being tangentially related to another character, introduced at the last minute and totally unpleasant. I never had a grasp of any of the characters other than the narrator and his girlfriend, and could never guess which one the author was talking about until he used their names. You'd think one would be able to tell the difference between a cyborg monk, a former literary magazine editor, an absentminded professor and a detective of the occult, but I couldn't.

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LibraryThing member loafhunter13

There is a long tradition of Great Detectives, and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. But his search for a missing cat uncovers a ghost, a time traveler, AND the devastating secret of humankind! Detective Gently's bill for saving the human race from extinction: NO CHARGE. A slight change for Adams

though familiar themes are covered. An electric monk designed simply to believe, a 4 billion year old alien ghost, a murdered dotcom millionaire, a computer software genius and a time-traveling Cambridge professor come together with the title character to determine the fate of mankind as dictated by the poetry of Englishman Coleridge. Perhaps a stab at pulp noir with his normal cosmic twists, the book was entertaining but did not tread as happily carelessly as the Hitchhiker series. One can detect portions of the book where Adams attempted to write in a different style. These sections are book thankfully ended by lapses into the flippant, aside-filled jaunts that made him enjoyable. While it has it moments and the characters are entertaining, the plot and subplots amble along, sometimes without purpose or satisfying resolution. It seems as if Adams attempting to write a book with a similar scale and connectivity as he previous works and cram in all into a 200 page detective story. While it is not as concrete as the Hitchhiker series, it is full of the Adams' charm and sets up the much stronger sequel nicely.

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LibraryThing member regularguy5mb

What do an elderly college professor, his abacus, an Electric Monk, his horse, a computer programmer, and his boss all have to do with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a couch stuck in a doorway? Nobody is really sure, but Dirk Gently plans to find out!

I'll admit, it took me a while to get into this

one, but once I did I couldn't wait to see where it went next. The first of Adams' Dirk Gently stories has a few plot elements borrowed from two of his Doctor Who scripts, and for my money, didn't have nearly enough Dirk ("Where's Dirk?" I kept complaining as I started reading, continued reading, continued complaining, etc.). However, it is still a fantastic read!

What I love about Adams is the way he can make even the most mundane take on elements of the absurd. His descriptions especially, like writing how the ceiling seems momentarily startled when Dirk yells upwards from his desk. Absurdity on top of absurdity makes for a brilliant Douglas Adams story, And Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is definitely that.

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LibraryThing member Aristocats

I recently finished reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams for one of the challenges I'm in. It's been quite a while since I've read a Douglas Adams book (last one was Salmon of Doubt a few years back) but I knew I'm in for a treat. And indeed, it has the same excellent

humor as we are already used to from the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The main plot idea seems to be Gordon Way's shooting during a call to his sister Susan's answering machine and Richard MacDuff's (an employee of Gordon's working on a program to convert data into music, currently dating Susan) seemingly implication in the murder; even if Gordon Way is dead his ghost is still roaming around. Dirk Gently, Richard's former college friend, believes in the fundamental interconnectedness of everything and tries to help Richard to prove he's innocent.

However, this is just a small part of the plot, in fact a very small one: time travel, aliens and other ideas are mixed in to create another great and funny Douglas Adams book.

Towards the end I was totally lost since I had no idea what the Coleridge connection is. After some searches on the internets, I discovered that the novel cannot be fully understood without familiarity with Samuel Taylor Coleridge life and works, particularly The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan poems. I found some notes though on a website so things got clearer.

During these searches on the net I also found out that the sofa irreversibly stuck on the stairs is based on an incident that happened during Adams’ college life.

Overall, a great read, 4 out of 5 stars.

I can't wait to read the next Dirk Gently book, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

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LibraryThing member atreic

It's clever. It's plotty. It's Douglas Adams. It just might be a bit _too_ clever and plotty and Douglas Adams even for me. There's a nice Douglas Adam's quote where he admits that the ending is Really Quite Confusing: "Ahem. All I can say is that it was as clear as day to me when I wrote it and

now I can't figure it out myself. Sorry about that. I'm actually thinking about it at the moment as I've been re-reading the book in preparation for doing a screenplay. I've got a little bit of sorting out to do..."

But it is full of warm fuzzies of there being music and maths at the depth of the universe, and all the little throw away resolutions, like how the sofa got stuck halfway up the stairs, are wonderful.

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LibraryThing member DLMorrese

The cast of delightful characters in this book includes a software developer, a forgetful time traveler, an electric monk, a couple of ghosts (one used to be human), and a ‘holistic detective’ who claims he isn’t psychic. It also includes several smiles and a place or two where laughing out

loud is required.

I pulled my old first paperback edition off my shelves a couple days ago (noting the whopping $4.50 cover price) because I just finished reading Shada by Gareth Roberts, which was a novelization for an unaired script written by Douglas Adams for the Doctor Who TV series. Something about Shada reminded me of this book. And it should have. Professor Chronotis, appears in both. In Shada, he is clearly an absentminded Time Lord. In Dirk Gently’s Holistics Detective Agency, he still is -- except the term ‘Time Lord’ isn’t used because this is not a Doctor Who story. Although it is, except it does not include the Doctor, so it really isn’t. In a way, it could be seen as a sequel to Shada with Professor Chronotis as the common character between them. Rereading this novel after Shada, provided answers to questions I had before, like who Chronotis is, where he got his time machine (now obviously a TARDIS), why he has lived so long, and what it was he enigmatically retired from before taking his post at Cambridge.

There are still a couple of things that leave me scratching my head -- like what exactly did they do to stop the alien ghost from altering the course of Earth history? My only complaint about the novel is that there isn’t more of it. I would have loved to see some of the scenes expanded, especially a bit more on the ‘electric monk’ and the scenes where Chronotis, Richard, and Dirk are travelling in the time machine not called a TARDIS, exploring the alien ghost’s ancient spaceship, and bringing him back in time to ‘correct’ his mistake. (I know that all may seem confusing, but I try not to put plot spoilers in these pseudo reviews.)

So, my recommendation for people who have previously read this book is to reread it after reading Shada. If you haven’t read this book, read Shada first, then this one, and then read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. That’s what I plan to do tonight.

(My recommendations presume some familiarity with Doctor Who. If you are not familiar with Doctor Who, you have much catching up to do.)

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LibraryThing member TysonAdams

I loved this book when I was young. Now that I'm much older I not only loved this book, but actually thought it was better than when I originally read it. Douglas Adams launches all sorts of scathing attacks on the silly stuff in society as ably as he creates a weird and wacky story.

A true legend

of literature and this novel was a great example of his status as such.

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LibraryThing member Rosey_Kim

The world of Dirk Gently is satisfying proof that niche writers shouldn’t be dismissed as successful because they write to a similar formula.

Gently is a rational man entangled in the solving of paranormal crimes which he does largely through common sense and educated guesswork.

The situations

Gently and supporting characters are often farcical but the character of Gently himself keeps the story from becoming pure comedy. He is an anti-hero answer to Sherlock Holmes, a detective bridging the gap between hardboiled efficiency and slapstick comic relief. The crime/mystery storyline is developed at a good pace and the story is furnished with healthy dollops of Adams-style observational humour and unconventional metaphor.

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