Douglas Adam’s book is somewhat a homage to the computer it was written on, with numerous Mac keywords dropped about the masterpiece. If some one would ever to use the book as is on a web page, the google results would be magnifique!
Here’s some info, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by Douglas Adams. It is described on its cover as a “thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic”. Like many of Adams’ stories, its plot defies easy encapsulation.
The book was followed by a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, although the only recurring major characters are Gently himself, Janice Pearce and Sergeant Gilks. Adams began writing The Salmon of Doubt with the intention of it being the third book in the series.
A BBC Radio adaptation starring Harry Enfield was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesdays from 18.30 to 19.00, starting 3 October 2007 and finishing 7 November 2007. A second series based on the sequel began broadcasting at 11.00pm on 2 October 2008.
Dirk bills himself as a “holistic detective” who makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person. This involves running up large expense accounts and then claiming that every item (such as needing to go to a tropical beach in the Bahamas for three weeks) was, due to the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, actually a vital part of the investigation. Challenged on this point in the first novel, he claims that he cannot in fairness be considered to have ripped anybody off, because none of his clients have paid him yet. He maintains an office at 33a Peckender St. N1 London, with telephone number 01-354 9112 (407-2882 in the advertising campaign for the book).
Once a student at St. Cedd’s College, Cambridge, he left in disgrace when on one occasion, attempted to acquire money by selling exam papers for the upcoming tests. His fellow students were convinced that he had produced the papers under hypnosis — in reality, he had simply studied previous papers and determined potential patterns in the questions. However when his papers turned out to be exactly the same as the real papers, to the very comma, he was arrested and sent to prison. This is but one example of Gently’s odd facility for accurate assumptions: every wild guess and flippant answer he makes turns out to be absolutely true.
Dirk Gently (real name Svlad Cjelli, also known as Dirk Cjelli) is a fictional character created by Douglas Adams and featured in the books Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. He is portrayed as an overweight man who normally wears a heavy old light brown suit, red checked shirt with a green striped tie, long leather coat, red hat and thick metal-rimmed spectacles.
“Dirk Gently” is not the character’s real name; it is noted early on in the first book that it is a pseudonym for “Svlad Cjelli”. Dirk himself states that the name has a “Scottish dagger feel” to it.
Dirk Gently‘s plot is highly non-linear due to the use of time travel and other story elements, and is related here for continuity.
Four billion years ago, nine dozen multi-tentacled creatures called Salaxalans, discontent with their own world, leave and attempt to populate Earth. They leave their mothership in orbit, but, due to the laziness of the engineer and faulty advice from their Electric Monk, an automaton designed to believe things so its owners don’t have to, their landing craft explodes on Earth, triggering a spark that creates amino acids and the start of life on earth. The Salaxalan engineer, having thus failed to complete a task during his life, is forced to wander the Earth as a ghost. He watches as terrestrial life develops. In the early 1800s, the ghost learns of a time machine owned by Professor Reg Chronotis at St Cedd’s, but is unable to use it. The ghost finds he can influence humans, and possesses Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write a second verse to his “Kubla Khan” poem that includes instructions on fixing the damaged lander, as well as additional references in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“. The ghost then continues to look for a way to influence Reg to use the time machine to “correct” the past.
In the present, the Salaxalan ghost manages to weakly influence Reg to use the time machine, disguised as his chambers at St. Cedd’s, to travel to a distant planet, taking possession of another Electric Monk wandering it. However, this particular Monk had developed a malfunction and practises all sorts of random religions, each for only a few minutes at a time. Finding the Monk unreliable, the ghost leaves it to wander on Earth, and through a series of additional influences, finds itself able to possess that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, a writer recently fired as editor of a magazine. The ghost urges Michael to kill the magazine’s new editor, Albert Ross, and then has him read Coleridge’s works, preparing him to confront Reg to use the time machine in order to prevent the lander’s explosion in the past.
Meanwhile, the Electric Monk is told by a porter to “shoot off”, and so “shoots off” at Gordon Way, president of Way Forward Technologies II, during a call to his sister Susan’s answering machine. The Monk goes on to suffer several other misadventures. Gordon’s ghost, having not yet finished his phone call, witnesses Ross’ murder, and manages to relay this to Susan over the phone before fading away. Richard MacDuff, an employee of Gordon’s working on a program to convert data into music, currently dating Susan, and a friend of Reg’s, finds himself as a possible suspect in Gordon’s death, and attempts to remove evidence from Susan’s machine that would implicate him. Dirk Gently, Richard’s friend and sole detective in his “Holistic Detective Agency”, catches Richard in the act, and persuades him to tell him what happened. After hearing the events from Richard and consulting with a child, Dirk works out that Richard’s, among others, actions have been under the influence of a ghost, and that the only thing that could explain the events would be a time machine. When Dirk and Richard question Reg he admits to having a time machine, but they are confronted by Michael, still possessed by the Salaxalan ghost. The ghost convinces Reg to use the time machine to go back to just before the lander exploded so he can fix it. As the three see the possessed Michael off, Richard learns from Susan about Michael’s murder of Ross, and the three realize that the lander’s exploding is what creates life on earth. Using Reg’s time machine, they travel to visit Coleridge, so that Dirk (”the man from Porlock“) can distract him and thus alter “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” so that the Salaxalan ghost will not have the proper instructions to stop the lander’s explosion. They then destroy the Salaxalan mothership.
Dirk, Richard, and Reg return to the present to find things much as they were before, though Reg’s time machine no longer works. Reg “rescued” a small proportion of the the wondrous music heard by Richard on board the Salaxalan satellite, explained as the oeuvre of J. S. Bach (although Reg brought back many times more music than one man could write in a single lifetime). One of Dirk’s old cases no longer needs to be solved, and he sends a revised bill to the client, “For saving humankind – no charge.”
- Dirk Gently (also known by a number of other names, including Svlad Cjelli), the 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 concocted a “get-rich scheme” offering a university exam preparation service and was eventually sent to prison when, by sheer coincidence, he accurately duplicated the exam papers for that year without having seen them.
- 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 for no immediately obvious reason 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”.
- An Electric Monk from a planet very far from the Earth. Electric monks are coincidentally humanoid robots designed to practise religion in their owners’ stead. This particular monk had accidentally been connected to a video recorder and, in attempting to believe everything on the TV, had malfunctioned and begun to believe “all kinds of things, more or less at random”, including things like tables being hermaphrodites and God wanting a lot of money sent to a certain address. Since it was cheaper to replace the Monk than to repair it, the Monk was cast out in the wilderness to believe whatever it liked. The Monk also owns a somewhat cynical horse, which he was allowed to keep because “horses were so cheap to make”. Upon his arrival on Earth, the Monk has several humorous misadventures.
- 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 realises.
- 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.
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 South Bank Show revealed that Adams based Chronotis’ rooms on the rooms he occupied in his third year at university. Likewise, Richard’s room – filled with Macintosh computers and synthesisers – was based on Adams’ own flat (visited and photographed by Hi-Fi Choice Magazine).
The story borrows elements from two Doctor Who serials written by Adams:
- In City of Death an alien (Scaroth the Jagaroth) tries to change history by using time travel to avert a disastrous spaceship launch in the primeval past, at the cost of erasing humanity from existence. The Jagaroth are replaced by the Salaxalans in Dirk Gently. Scaroth is splintered throughout time, whereas the Salaxalan Ghost lives through all the billions of years.
- In Shada, a professor called Chronotis is hundreds of years old. He has been living and working at a Cambridge college for centuries, without anyone noticing. He possesses an eccentric time machine. In Shada, Chronotis’s longevity is due to him being a Time Lord, and his time machine is an early model TARDIS. These copyright elements from Doctor Who were removed by Adams for Dirk Gently. Shada, which never aired due to a production strike terminating its filming, was later released on VHS with Tom Baker narrating the unfilmed segments. Shada was completed as a webcast with slight alterations to the script, with Paul McGann as the Doctor and John Leeson as K9. The webcast is available at The Official Doctor Who Website and released on CD by Big Finish productions.
This novel caused Adams to become acquainted with the well-known scientist Richard Dawkins. As Dawkins explains, “As soon as I finished it, I turned back to page one and read it straight through again – the only time I have ever done that, and I wrote to tell him so. He replied that he was a fan of my books, and he invited me to his house in London.” Adams would later introduce Dawkins to the woman who was to become his third wife, the actress Lalla Ward, best known for playing the character Romana in Doctor Who. One of her early serials on the programme was City of Death.
Adaptations
On January 5th, 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. 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.
The book has been adapted for stage performance as Dirk.
In 2005, some fans of Douglas Adams decided to produce a fan radio series based on the first book. Their efforts began and were coordinated on the Douglas Adams Continuum website. So far, three episodes have been completed.
A publishing company has been seeking the rights to produce a graphic novel adaptation, though art has been removed for legal reasons.
BBC Radio adaptation
Announced on 26 January 2007, BBC Radio 4 commissioned Above the Title Productions to make eighteen 30-minute adaptations of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently books (including The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and the unfinished The Salmon of Doubt,) running in three series of six episodes.
The first series began on 3 October 2007 and features Harry Enfield as Dirk, Billy Boyd as Richard, Olivia Colman as Janice, Jim Carter as Gilks, Andrew Sachs as Reg, Felicity Montagu as Susan, Robert Duncan as Gordon, Toby Longworth as the Monk, Michael Fenton Stevens as Michael, Andrew Secombe, Jon Glover, Jeffrey Holland, Wayne Forester and Tamsin Heatley.[8][9][10]
The script is by Dirk Maggs, who also directs, and John Langdon. The show is produced by Maggs and Jo Wheeler. As with the previous Hitchhiker’s series, the cd version features greatly expanded episodes. The official websites are at bbc.co.uk/radio4/dirkgently and www.abovethetitle.com/hda_home.php.
The trailer for the second series, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, is now online here bbc.co.uk/radio4/dirkgently/rams/dirkgently.ram
Difference between BBC Radio version and the novel
There are a number of structural and detail differences between the radio adaptation and the book, mostly to aid the comprehension of the story when split into six half-hour episodes; this adaptation is a considered step away from the original Shada story structure. (Also, in the book Dirk Gently doesn’t appear for the first 90 pages: If the radio adaptation had followed the book in structure the main character would not have appeared until episode three!)
In particular, the main characters have a closer relationship than in the novel. Dirk Gently is being employed by Gordon Way to monitor Richard McDuff’s working hours, Michael Wenton-Weeks also went to St Cedd’s College with Dirk and Richard. It was Michael (not Al Ross) who printed Richard’s musical-fractals article in the magazine, and Michael’s mother has just sold the magazine, rather than several months previously. There is a much closer relationship between Janice Pierce and Dirk, as she accompanies Dirk rather than being wholly absent.
There are a number of new details, such as the actual music played by the Anthem II Software. playing the UK’s Balance of Payments, the dock-leaf soup (”is it fresh?”/”Yes, sir, it says so on the tin”). Some other characters have been expanded, in particular the worker at the motorway service station.
Other structural changes include the use of a public telephone for a conversation between Richard and Susan outside the Greek restaurant (with the addition of a 42 reference), Janice being present at Richard’s hypnosis, a much expanded Electric Monk part, and some minor details such as the actual location of the brick Wordsworth was sick on.
Minor changes in the story’s alternative time-line include the BBC’s political editor being Davis Evans (rather than Evan Davis) and Kubla Khan being “the longest poem in English literature” as well as references to the coronation of Edward VIII (who was never crowned), and Jeremy Clarkson being the BBC’s environment correspondent (rather than a motoring journalist).
Dirk is possessed by the Ghost of Gordon Way to discover what happened to Gordon after his death, when he visits the murder scenes (as a “crime tourist”) in Oxfordshire with Richard and Janice, which does not happen in the book.
The Radio version makes occasional references to the song “Hot Potato”, a plot element from the second Dirk Gently novel The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, which puts Richard a performer whose work is released as Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo.
Wenton Weeks murders his mother in the radio version (making, momentarily, a third ghost), not Al Ross who is edited out. The devotional interview between the Electric Monk and Gilks is not contained in the book, but the encounter on the train to Cambridge between the wedding party and Weeks (mirroring Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) has been removed (but is reinstated in the extended CD version), as has his fingertapping taxi-ride.
At the end of the radio serial Dirk, Reg and Richard prevent the sofa from being stuck on the stairs, rather than create the situation whereby it gets stuck there – and Reg ‘returns’ the characters to the day before they left where they stay, rather than travelling to three weeks before and then returning to the actual day they left.
Audiobook adaptation
Apart from the radio broadcasts, Douglas Adams recorded both unabridged and abridged readings of the first novel for the audiobook market.
