1987;
291 pages. New Author? : No. Genre : British Humor; Fantasy; Quasi-Mystery. Overall Rating : 8*/10.
Gordon Way has been killed. Even he can see that. Literally.
Because he’s now a ghost, and everyone knows you can’t become one of
those until you’re no longer alive.
Strangely, Gordon has no idea who shot him. Neither do the police. But they have a strong lead – Richard
MacDuff. He has a motive and the means, no
alibi, and was caught acting very strange on the night of the murder.
Richard needs to hire a Private Investigator to clear his name and
determine who really did kill Gordon. So he pays a visit to Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency? After all, he’s met Dirk once, albeit many
years ago. And funnily enough, Reg was just asking
about him at dinner tonight.
Wait a minute. Just what the heck
is a “holistic” detective agency, anyway?
What’s To Like...
Dirk Gently’s
Holistic Detective Agency follows Douglas Adams’ (first three books of) Hitchhiker’s
Guide To The Galaxy series, and simply put, has the same captivating weirdness that makes
HHGTTG so popular. You might think from the title that it is
going to be a Murder-Mystery, and both those elements are present, at least for
a while. But really the focus isn’t on
the “who” and “why”, which are both revealed early on. Instead, it’s on the “how’d this come about?” aspect.
All
the characters are well-developed and unique.
Dirk Gently may be the headliner, but he’s pudgy, doesn’t appear until
37%, and is somewhat of an a$$hole. Still,
it’s fun to watch him as he utilizes his Sherlock Holmesian logic to “solve”
the case. Richard MacDuff is the perfect
schmuck of a protagonist, and it’s a blast to watch Gordon as he “learns” the
physics of being a ghost.
Like
HHGTTG, DGHDA
is a geek’s delight. There are
multiverses and time travel, an impossibly stuck sofa, and a horse in a
bathtub. We learn the truth about Bach
and Coleridge, and even Ginger Baker gets a brief mention. Since it was written in 1987, it was an unexpected
treat to meet up with some obsolete technology – car tape decks, telephone
answering machines where you rewind the tape to play back messages, and outside
public telephones.
I
liked the writing style. Adams spins
several separate (POV) storylines simultaneously to keep things from becoming
boring; then gradually and skillfully brings them together. There’s wit aplenty, lots of plot twists, and
a couple cusswords thrown in to keep the prudes away.
Kewlest New Word ...
Moggy (n.) : a cat, especially one that doesn’t
have a pedigree (a
Britishism)
Others : Pettishly
(adj.); Mazy
(adj.); Dep
(v., Britishism, and unclear in meaning)
Kindle Details...
Amazon
offers the e-book version of Dirk Gently’s Holistic
Detective Agency for $11.99, which seems somewhat steep
to me. The rest of Adams’ sci-fi books
are priced in the $6.99-$7.99 range.
Excerpts...
By means of an
ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and
exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic,
telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat.
What did
“psychosassic” mean?
It was his own
word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all. (loc. 603)
“Do you know,”
said Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, blinking with
suppressed emotion, “that when I arrive back here to discover one police
officer guarding a sofa with a saw and another dismembering an innocent
wastepaper basket I have to ask myself certain questions? And I have to ask them with the disquieting
sense that I am not going to like the answers when I find them.
“I then find
myself mounting the stairs with a horrible premonition, Svlad Cjelli, a very
horrible premonition indeed. A
premonition, I might add, that I now find horribly justified. I suppose you can’t shed any light on a horse
discovered in a bathroom as well? That
seemed to have an air of you about it.”
“I cannot,” said
Dirk, “as yet. Though it interests me
strangely.” (loc. 2391)
“Now. Having saved the entire human race from
extinction I could do with a pizza.” (loc.
3519)
The only issue I had with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was the
ending, which was a bit of a letdown. While
it’s true that Dirk deductively reasons out the “big picture” conundrum, none
of the lesser plotlines are resolved.
Gordon remains a ghost, and the misadventures of Dirk, Reg, Richard, and
Susan, etc. just kind of grind to a halt, to be continued in Book 2.
Along
those same lines, the reader meets a number of fascinating characters, who
enter, get developed, then exit the story, never to reappear. Among them are Sergeant Gilks, Janet Pearce,
and a precocious young girl named Sarah.
But I suppose some of them will show up in the sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
But this is a small price to pay for another heaping helping of Douglas
Adams zaniness and wit, and it’s a pity that he passed away while working on
Book 3, The Salmon of Doubt, the unfinished pieces of which were issued in
a patchwork collection of his other writings in 2005. I borrowed DGHDA from my local digital
library, which offers the other two books in the series as well. I will probably read the second one, because
I’m an Adams Aficionado, but I’m iffy on Book 3.
8 Stars. Listen, the Dirk Gently series is never going to supplant HHGTTG
as everyone’s favorite Douglas Adams reading.
But it’s a fine, well-written supplement to Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox, and it
kept me entertained throughout.
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