Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

3 stars, no paws, bedtime reading.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to see Marilyn Monroe at 85 or James Dean in his sixties? While they died too young, their tragic deaths are part of their legends, and in some ways it is the same with Douglas Adams who died in 2001. Imagine for a moment, though, what might have come after Hitchhiker’s Guide and his various film and TV projects – would he have managed to top it (the later parts of the HHG series are less exciting, after all), or would his career have fizzled out, to be replaced by campaigning for rescuing endangered animals and preserving ecosystems, as he started in “Last Chance to See” with his mate Mark Carwardine? He might have contributed to the new Dr Who series, written more books (his Wikipedia entry suggests that this would only have happened under duress…) and seen the Hitchhiker’s movie (perhaps disapproved of it), as well as the recent BBC  serialisation of Dirk Gently.

After seeing the Dirk Gently pilot with Stephen Mangan, Darren Boyd and Helen Baxendale, I was sufficiently intrigued to order the book, but then didn’t get around to reading it until now. Rather surprisingly, we got another three-part series since, but it seems likely that there will not be any more of this enjoyable and weird adaptation on TV. Having seen the TV series first, the book is a bit of a surprise because it develops the idea of time and space travel much more strongly than we saw on TV, and I’m sure that upset fans of Douglas Adams and the book, but this level of complexity would not have worked in the dramatisation, not even on BBC Four. The other noticeable difference is that the book is mostly focussed on MacDuff, not Dirk Gently who is the protagonist on TV, although this may change in the second book of the series.

As is often the case, I would recommend treating the book as a separate entity from the TV series, recognising how the different media took different things from the story told, which remains clever and inventive in both versions. In the book, there is a clever condemnation of blind religious belief, a ghost story, a mysterious murder, a few snapshots of Cambridge college life, a flawed love story, and a reluctant buddy story, sprinkled with a bit of quantum mechanics and some wry observations on human relationships. If you can bear SciFi/Fantasy, this is good fun, and it’s sad to think that there won’t be any more from such a talented and inventive (I’m trying to avoid saying crazy) author.