I recently stumbled upon the IndieWeb Book Club, where Jo was setting the book of the month for April: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) by Douglas Adams. 📚 I recall reading it probably some 25 years ago and figured it’s high time to read it again. I thought I remembered something about the book, but in reality I didn’t remember anything else besides a sofa stuck in a hallway.

In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Richard MacDuff, a programmer working for the millionaire computer genius George Way, becomes a person of interest when Way is murdered, so he seeks help from a peculiar private detective who goes by the name Dirk Gently. Gently follows the holistic approach that says that everything is connected. Sherlock Holmes remarked that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, but Dirk refuses to be limited by what people generally consider “impossible”. That will turn out to be a handy trait indeed when the case starts to involve ghosts and time travel…

The book starts a bit slow with an Electric Monk on horseback and a dinner at a university, and it isn’t even until the end of the fourth chapter that the titular Dirk Gently is mentioned for the first time. The ending also leaves you rather flabbergasted about what actually happened when time, space, and spacetime don’t quite behave themselves. Suffice it to say it would also help a bit if you knew The Rime of the Ancient Mariner poem by Samuel Coleridge, which apparently everyone in the UK knows. Between the start and the ending the book is still enjoyable enough, with Adams showing his fascination for computers and technology as well as his detest for the British telephone systems. Maybe I should read the second Dirk Gently book again as well, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.