The novel “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” by Douglas Adams was published for the first time in 1987.

Richard MacDuff is a programmer who works at WayForward Technologies, which among others produces the software Anthem, which converts spreadsheets into music. One day he meets his old college tutor, Professor Chronotis, and sees him perform what seem magic tricks.

When he returns to his apartment in London, MacDuff starts doing things out of the ordinary. Involved in a strange affair, he’s helped to unravel a series of mysteries he didn’t even notice ​​by Dirk Gently, the owner of an agency that specializes in disappeared cats and complicated divorces. The investigator operates under the assumption that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

In the course of his life, Douglas Adams was also a screenwriter and script editor for the famous TV show “Doctor Who”. In these roles, he wrote the screenplay for the adventure “Shada”, never transmitted because a strike prevented its completion, and co-wrote the script for “City of Death”. A few years later, he took various elements from both stories to write “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”.

This novel is a mix of genres and Douglas Adams himself described it as an thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic. Of course there’s comedy because in the end the author became famous especially for the funny elements of his stories. That doesn’t mean that the elements of other genres were superficial and this is even more true in “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”.

Initially, the plot of this novel may seem vague and confused, an excuse to create funny moments with witty jokes. The plot is actually fragmented into a story told from different points of view that are constantly changing. Dirk Gently, who is supposed to be the protagonist or at least that’s what the title suggests, comes into the picture only after many pages.

In fact, if you manage to avoid falling into confusion, you can slowly start understanding that the story has a sense that becomes more and more precise and somewhat rational. Dirk Gently’s work is based on the idea that there is a fundamental interconnectedness of all things and this is also true for the elements of the plot, which form a sort of jigsaw puzzle whose pieces slowly fall into place.

Despite a certain baseline lightness, Douglas Adams tended to put into his stories very solid scientific elements. In this case it’s quantum mechanics, however it can also help to add to the confusion for the reader because of its effects. This is a novel that really requires attention to avoid getting lost among the many apparently meaningless events.

For Douglas Adams, comedy took various forms, including that of satire. In this case, it concern the corporate world, represented in the novel by WayForward Technologies. The author learned to use computers when he was already an adult so in this novel he enjoys mocking in a brilliant way the world of software creation.

In this great literary “cocktail”, the characters are a bit sacrificed. They’re all someway eccentric but their development is limited. They’re characterized by what they say and think more than by their actions. In the novel there are more dialogues and thoughts of the characters that action and this means that the pace tends to be slow.

“Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” and its sequels have been adapted for a radio drama and a short TV show uses some of its characters and situations. The novel was also adapted into a stage play.

“Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” is a quantum novel so I liked and didn’t like it at the same time. In some moments it seemed even better that the Guide, in others I found it cumbersome. At times I was distracted by the elements inspired by Douglas Adams’s screenplays written for “Doctor Who” focusing more on those than on the story. Probably fans of Adams and humorous science fiction will like it.