Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

I have to start with the hard facts: Douglas Adams died, of a sudden heart attack, more than twenty years ago, when he was five years younger than I am now. I've read all of his books, but long ago - mostly when they came out, or soon afterward.

For example, my copy of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a first printing US hardcover from 1987, which means I spent the whole $14.95 on it when I was a poor college student. I haven't read it since then, but I did recently read a 2016 comics series about Dirk, which I suppose is what sent me back to the original.

I've always thought that the Dirk books are the ones that mostly clearly show the Dr. Who influence on Adams - they're circling books, full of seemingly-random ideas that join up later in the story, and are amusing in a light-adventure way rather than being filled with clear jokes like the Hitchhiker stories. There's no "Doctor" character to put it all right, of course, and - especially in this first book - Dirk himself in no way fills that role, despite what some might expect.

The comics series makes Dirk much more central and active. In this book, he's mentioned fairly early, but doesn't appear until the book is more than half over, and is basically a secondary character in his own novel.

Our main character is Richard MacDuff, a computer whiz for the British computer start-up WayForward Technologies, who we meet at a long, boring dinner at the fictional St. Cedd's College at Cambridge, listening to a very long recitation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kublai Khan."

This is a clue: in our world, "Kublai Khan" is short, with Coleridge famously interrupted when writing it by the mysterious "person from Porlock."

But the narrative runs through other things even before getting to Richard: starting with a mysterious tower in a mysterious landscape mysteriously exploding, and then moving on to an Electric Monk wandering about somewhere else, doing its job of believing in things so that people don't have to.

Later, there's a thread following Richard's boss, Gordon Way, the usual self-obsessed tech mogul, who comes to an unpleasant end.

And, of course, there are eventually both ghosts and time travel, and a certain amount of saving the world that has to be done. Not to mention Richard, absent-minded as only a boffin in a story by a British writer can be, needs to repair his relationship with his girlfriend Susan, who he completely ignored to go the boring St. Cedd's dinner.

As I understand it, the Dr. Who influence comes about because it was two different Dr. Who stories - Adams wrote for the show in the late '70s, and re-used ideas from one broadcast serial, City of Death, and the famously strike-cancelled serial Shada in this novel. Adams, it has to be said, was frightfully efficient with ideas: if he had one he liked, he used it as many times as he could, like an old lady bringing an ancient tea-bag out of her purse to dunk in yet another cup of hot water.

Dirk Gently is a good SFF adventure story, with Adams' characteristic light touch and a lot of quirky details. It led to one more novel and an aborted third; at this point all hopes for more - either for a longer Dirk series, or for more random light SFF adventure stories somewhat like this one - were dashed long ago. Adams never liked writing, so it's something of a miracle we got as much as we did out of him, but, despite being somewhat built from pre-existing parts, this is one of the best, and most novel-shaped, things he ever did.