At the time of his death in 2001, Douglas Adams was a successful and popular author with a dedicated fan base, due in large part to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in all its various forms. By contrast, the Dirk Gently novels- Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul and the abortive Salmon of Doubt occupy a rather more tangential and apocryphal place in his output. M.J. Simpson’s biography of Adams refers to The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul three times, and two of those references are to Adams undertaking publicity and signing tours rather than the novel itself. The Dirk Gently novels do, however, bridge the gap between the first four Hitch-Hiker books and Mostly Harmless, Adams’s last published complete novel, and also represent an attempt to create something different from the universe on which Adams had expended much of his creative energies since the late 1970’s. The fact that Adams only completed two of the novels and appears to have abandoned The Salmon of Doubt at some stage in the mid-1990’s is perhaps indicative of the limited success which he enjoyed with his new character and suggests that as Adams matured as an author, he found the Dirk Gently world a more congenial home for his observations than the Hitch-Hiker universe.

I first read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency in the late 1980’s when it first came out- in fact, if I have a dig around in my parents’ attic, I may even find it’s a first edition hardback as I persuaded my grandmother to buy it for me as a present for some occasion or other. As a teenage Who fan, I was of course more interested in what Adams made of the elements of ‘City of Death’ and ‘Shada’ which he cobbled together to provide a framework for the novel, and I do remember feeling rather disappointed in the outcome. At the time, very few people had seen the surviving footage from ‘Shada’, so working out what had been cannibalised from Adams’s script was somewhat hit and miss- in fact, as later video and CD releases have made clear, the main recycled elements are Professor Chronotis and his time-travelling rooms at St Cedd’s College in Cambridge. The character scenes with Chronotis and Adams’s reader identification figure Richard MacDuff (who is given most of the lines spoken by Chris Parsons in ‘Shada’) are one of the highlights of the novel, and it’s clear that Adams enjoyed creating the Professor and writing his dialogue. Adams also re-uses the climax of ‘City of Death’ to wrap up the novel, complementing his use of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ as a leitmotif, and the concept of life on Earth being triggered by the explosion of an alien spacecraft is equally effective here as it was in Doctor Who in 1979. The other elements are, perhaps, a little more uneven- the Electric Monk is a clever idea, but fades out of the plot having served its purpose, and the torment suffered by the ghost of Gordon Way feels out of place. Most unfortunate of all is the way in which Adams clearly wrote sections of the novel in a surge of enthusiasm for mid-to-late-1980’s technology- carphones, answering machines and cutting-edge computers which can model problems in three dimensions and convert numbers into music. It’s difficult therefore not to look at this aspect with the same distaste and mocking hindsight that we reserve for library footage of 1980’s yuppies with mobile phones the size of a house brick. As an exercise in re-using material which was too good to go to waste, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is ultimately an enjoyable end project- it’s just that the linking material isn’t up to the same standard.

I came to The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul completely fresh- having been discouraged by the first Dirk Gently novel (and the fact that Adams did a signing in Liverpool shortly after my grandmother bought me a copy of the hardback) I didn’t feel encouraged to continue with the next one. The basic situation is, for want of a better word, Pythonesque- that, having ceased to be worshipped in the manner to which he has become accustomed, the Norse god Odin has sold out to a yuppie couple in return for comfortable treatment in a private hospital for the rest of his days. This creates some amusing situations when the god Thor attempts to acclimatise to life in the 1980’s, however it also leads to a muddled and unsatisfactory conclusion, as the conflict between Thor and Odin is resolved offstage and the promised confrontation never really happens. Instead, we have a series of elaborately constructed digs at the workings of the music industry and other media, lawyers and the advertising industry- probably cutting edge or at least reasonably sharp in 1988, but rather old hat in 2003. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the reason why this particular part of the Adams oeuvre tends to be overlooked is that it’s a deeply unsatisfactory read- by this stage, Adams appears to have been constructing his novels by putting a series of ideas and situations together in the first half and then tying it all together in the second half so the novel at least has a beginning, middle and end. It’s a technique suited to constructing a four-part Doctor Who serial, but in a humorous novel it tends to lead to a second half bulked out with jokes and situations designed to keep things going until the end once Adams had used all the clever ideas.

To return for a moment to M.J. Simpson’s biography of Adams, he describes the publication of the existing chapters of The Salmon of Doubt as "a sad and unnecessary inclusion in a book which some consider to have been rushed out with unseemly haste". Given that Adams had frequently mentioned Salmon in interviews as a work in progress for several years, and publication dates were occasionally pencilled in on optimistic publishers’ schedules from the mid-1990’s onwards, Simpson’s statement overlooks the fact that material from the work in progress was known to exist and many of Adams’s readers were keen to see the chapters which Adams had written made public after his death as a suitable tribute. In fact, the Salmon collection is a useful anthology of Adams’s occasional writings and interviews for the reader interested in Adams himself as well as his fiction and, given that he left a widow and daughter, also reads to an extent as a combined tribute and benefit from the publishing industry. What actually exists are ten chapters which may or may not constitute the opening of a third Dirk Gently novel- there are occasional shifts in authorial perspective which may indicate that Adams intended a revision at some point or simply wrote the most interesting bits first and intended to fill the rest in later. Regrettably, the chapters which Adams wrote before shelving the work are some of the best writing in the Dirk Gently series, as if he had a much stronger conception of Dirk as a character by this stage. In the earlier novels, Gently is often enigmatic and inscrutable (perhaps inevitable given that in the first novel he has to fulfil some of the role intended for Tom Baker’s Doctor in ‘Shada’), but we now do have access to Gently’s thought processes rather than seeing him through an intermediary character and Adams simply seems to be more at ease writing character scenes for him. The fact that Salmon begins not long after the events of the previous novel also allows Adams to include some explanations which he perhaps felt were lacking, such as the nature of the eagle. All in all, what exists in a publishable form gives the impression of a novel with something of the exuberance of the Hitch-Hiker universe which had been sadly missing up to this point. It’s debatable whether Adams would ever have completed the story, as he is on record as saying that he had become bored with it and it appears to have been shelved if not abandoned circa 1995-6. Given that it was clearly not a preoccupation in the following six years leading up to his death, and that the Salmon title then became Adams’s generic title for any work in progress, it may be that it would have been consigned to his notebooks- in which case the existence of what survives is due in the main to his death at the age of 49.

The Dirk Gently novels are an overlooked part of Adams’s output mainly because they simply lack the expansiveness and sense of fun of the Hitch-Hiker novels with which Adams made his name and fortune. What is however interesting is that from the circumstances of the writing of the first novel and the circumstances of the publication of a fragment of the third, we have a much better understanding of Adams’s working methods and ingenuity as a writer than we do from the trilogy in five parts. During his life, Adams frequently commented on the number of projects with which he was involved at any one time, and it is to be regretted that the promise shown by the early chapters of The Salmon of Doubt will remain just that and that Dirk Gently will be forever stuck in New Mexico in the company of a rhinoceros handler and his charge.