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 any kind of coherent 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.)

At the time of his death in 2001, Adams was working on a new story he called The Salmon of Doubt. Story fragments retrieved from his computers feature Dirk Gently as a lead character, although it seems to have been in early stages of development. A short version compiled from his many drafts, along with several essays and other articles, can be found in the book of the same name, published one year after Adams' death.

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Contents

1 Plot
2 Characters
3 Notes
4 See also:

Plot

The convoluted plot of Dirk Gently begins with the introduction of a number of seemingly unrelated situations. The connections between them are gradually revealed, although seldom explicitly. The relative chronology of the happenings described below does not become evident until midway through the story or later.

Richard MacDuff attends an annual banquet at his alma mater of St Cedd's at the invitation of his old college tutor, Professor "Reg" Chronotis. Reg behaves somewhat more bizarrely than usual, apparently anxious to discuss something with Richard but never quite getting around to it. Sudden strange noises from the upstairs of Reg's rooms turn out to be a horse in the bathroom. This, for some reason, relieves Reg immensely. Richard suddenly remembers that the promise he made his girlfriend Susan: that they would do something special together tonight.

On a faraway alien planet, a device called an electric monk cycles through a series of ridiculous beliefs. Its only job is to believe things (thus saving other people the trouble of doing so), but a malfunction has caused its belief system to become increasingly erratic. Ejected from civilization with only a horse, it currently believes that its surroundings are pale pink and that an ordinary white door leads to a strange new world.

Technological entrepreneur Gordon Way is driving down a country road towards his cottage, talking to his sister's answering machine in a wandering stream of consciousness. When he pulls over to close his car's trunk, he is shot dead. His ghost, however, remains with no idea of why he still exists or what he should do next.

Michael Wenton-Weakes' wealthy father always gave him whatever he wanted. But now that the old man has died, Michael's mother proves to be a much more conscientious manager than her late husband was. The pampered young man finds his expensive toys being taken away, including his beloved money-hemhorraging magazine. For Michael, this "loss" festers into obsessive rage.

Svlad Cjelli's checkered past has included a number of very minor hustles. In college, however, an attempt to con his fellow students into free drinks and meals careened out of control until it led to Cjelli's arrest. Under the new name of Dirk Gently, he is currently the owner and sole investigator of a detective agency that purports to exploit the fundamental interconnectedness of everything to solve any case. Although he can produce any number of absurd arguments and justifications for his padded expense report, he is staggeringly successful at finding the truth, no matter how improbable it proves to be.

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. At university, Dirk, seemingly deliberately, created rumours about having clairvoyant abilities by vigorously denying that he had any. He eventually concocted a "get-rich scheme" and was eventually sent to prison when, by sheer coincidence, he accurately duplicated the exam papers for that year without having seen them before.
Richard MacDuff, a young software engineer working for WayForward Technologies II, owned by Gordon Way. His Anthem software, which is designed as a spreadsheet, but also has a unique feature to convert corporate accounts into music, was extremely popular, but he is falling behind in his deadlines to create an updated version.
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, and ends up getting shot by the Electric Monk a few chapters into the book.
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 in the book 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", including things like the world being pink and God wanting a lot of money sent to a certain address.
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 when the latter was changing an electric plug. 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, not only is it impossible to remove it, but there is no way for it to have got into that position 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 serials written by Adams, City of Death (in which an alien tries to change history at the cost of erasing humanity from existence) and Shada (a professor at a college who is far more mysterious than he initially seems), the latter of which was never aired due to a production strike terminating its filming.

On 5 January 1992, Dirk Gently, Richard MacDuff, Dirk's secretary, and the Electric Monk all appeared in the Douglas Adams episode of the British arts documentary series The South Bank Show.[link] Michael Bywater played Dirk, while Paul Shearer played both Richard and the Monk. Several characters from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were also featured, played by the original television series actors.

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 [link].

It could be argued that the novel begins on an alternative Earth. Although it is not apparent, at the beginning of the novel the music of Johann Sebastian Bach does not exist and Coleridge finished writing his poem Kubla Khan uninterrupted. 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 the poem. It is also hinted that the central theme of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was originally a meteorite until Dirk mentioned albatrosses, when Coleridge said that gave him an idea for a poem he was writing.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Plot

Characters

Notes

See also: