Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by Douglas Adams. It is described on its jacket as a "detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic". Like many stories that involve time travel, the plot of Dirk Gently defies easy encapsulation, or indeed even easy explanation.
The book was followed by a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, although the only recurring major character was Dirk Gently himself. (The only two other characters from the original novel who appear in Tea-Time are Dirk's secretary Miss Janice Pearce - now Mrs Janice Smith and working at the airport - and Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridge Constabulary, with whom Dirk has an antagonistic, but grudgingly respectful, relationship.)
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Plot
A programmer suddenly remembers a promise to his girlfriend. An elderly professor is relieved to discover a horse in his bathroom. An electric monk quietly malfunctions. A restless, ancient spirit seeks to complete one last task. A coddled dilettante sulks over being treated like an ordinary person. An eccentric tech company owner is killed on a dark country road. And a couch is stuck in Richard's hall.
All of these events, improbable as it sounds, are related. It takes a devious mind like that of Dirk Gently to find the common thread that draws them all together. But is Gently a genuine detective who uses the fundamental interconnectedness of things to seek the truth, or is he a mere con man? And is he smart enough to prevent the complete eradication of life on Earth?
Characters
- Dirk Gently (also known by a number of other names, including Svlad Cjelli), the perpetually broke operator of the eponymous detective agency that operates based on the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things." He specializes in missing cats and messy divorces. In college, Dirk created rumours about having clairvoyant abilities by vigorously denying that he had any.
- Richard MacDuff, a young software engineer working for WayForward Technologies II, owned by Gordon Way. His Anthem software, which converts corporate accounts into music, was extremely popular.
- Reg (Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology), Richard's old college tutor, a fellow of St. Cedd's College, Cambridge with no apparent duties, who is "on the older side of completely indeterminate". He has a predisposition for childish conjuring tricks and an extremely bad memory.
- Gordon Way, the owner of WayForward, who is pressuring Richard to complete his behind-schedule software project.
- Susan Way, sister of Gordon Way and professional cellist, and the "specific girl that Richard is not married to".
- A malfunctioning Electric Monk from a planet very far from the Earth. "The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. ... Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you from what was becoming an increasingly onerous task." The Monk was discarded by its owners due to a series of malfunctions that cause it to believe "all kinds of things, more or less at random."
- Michael Wenton-Weakes, the spoiled son of wealthy parents, known pejoratively as "Michael Wednesday-Week," which is when he promises to have the next issue of his poorly managed magazine Fathom ready. His mother sold Fathom to Gordon Way after his father's accidental death. While Michael seems largely apathetic and yielding to others, the loss of Fathom bothers him much more deeply than anyone realizes.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writer and laudanum user. For the sake of the novel, he is made to have attended St. Cedd's College. His poems Kubla Khan and Rime of the Ancient Mariner figure prominently in the plot, but their significance is not explained entirely until the book's end.
Notes
The central motif of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is the fundamental interconnectedness of everything. Many details may appear superfluous, but turn out to be integral to the plot. Chaos theory, as it has been popularized, is therefore an appropriate context for this novel. There are quantum mechanics references as well; phenomena of non-locality, as in the EPR paradox, make appearances.
In the novel, a sofa is irreversibly stuck on the staircase to Richard's apartment; according to his simulations, there was no way for it to get there in the first place. This is probably based on an incident that occurred while Douglas Adams attended St John's College of Cambridge University. Furniture was placed in the rooms overlooking the river in Third Court while the staircases were being refurbished. When the staircases were completed, it was discovered that the sofas could no longer be removed from the rooms, and the sofas remained in those rooms for several decades.
The story borrows elements from two Doctor Who episodes written by Adams, City of Death and Shada, the latter of which was never aired due to a production strike terminating its filming.
In 2005, a couple of Douglas Adams fans decided to make their own fan radio series, based on the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. (See the Dirk Gently Fan Radio Series Homepage.)
A publishing company is seeking the rights to produce a graphic novel adaptation [1].
It could be argued that the novel begins on an alternative Earth. At the beginning of the novel, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach does not exist, and Coleridge finished Kubla Khan uninterrupted. At the end, a complete text to Coleridge's Kubla Khan does not exist anymore. Bach's music was "created" by one of the novel's characters (using "a bit of a cheat"), and Dirk Gently turned out to be the person from Porlock who interrupted Coleridge, preventing the latter from completing "Kubla Khan."
See also:
- detective fiction
- I ♥ Huckabees, a movie about unconventional detectives using holistic-style methods
| Series: | Followed by: |
|---|---|
| Dirk Gently series | The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul |