Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

"Well, as I said, he didn’t really see himself as a science fiction writer. And he didn’t want to get stuck writing Hitchhiker’s the whole time. But the publishers were constantly asking him to do more Hitchhiker’s . You can see that in his notebooks. He wrote to himself: We employ you as a sausage factory, where are all the bloody sausages?????? But then he had this idea for a detective novel. And of course, he becomes a time-travelling detective. It’s hard to sum up the plot, you just have to work through it yourself. What you may find—I did—is that you get more out of it the second time you read it. It’s one of those books. You’ve got to concentrate. But it will make you laugh. Stephen Fry has spoken about the elegant phrasing. He compared it to P.G. Wodehouse , of whom they were both massive fans. It’s actually easier to follow as a radio series. You have to start with this one, but I probably prefer the second book, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul , the one with all the retired Norse gods. They gather together in what was then the disused St. Pancras railway station. I always wanted to see that made into a film, it would have been really moody and wonderful. But of course the place has been done up now. Right. The dialogue in all his books reads just like sketch comedy, it’s where he was coming from. Our book 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams has loads of stuff from that time: programme booklets, bits of script, all sorts of things. Douglas was part of a little comedy troupe called Adam Smith Adams, with two guys called Will Adams and Martin Smith—who was immortalised in Hitchhiker’s as ‘bloody Martin Smith of Croydon’—and they were into the whole Cambridge Footlights thing. They wrote shows, sketches together and performed them. Douglas loved performing. I think he was a terrible performer, actually. I never got on with his talking books, but maybe it’s because I knew Douglas and could hear him reading it, instead of acting."