Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams

"There are several biographies. This is the official one. There’s another by a friend of mine, M. J. Simpson, called Hitchhiker , which is very good for the real anoraks. It’s full of facts, figures, dates. Very well researched. But this one, Nick Webb’s, has a lot of depth to it if you want to read about the publishing landscape of the time, the deals that were going on, how his agent Ed Victor held an auction for his next set of books—which became Dirk Gently —and Douglas found out what he was worth. That was a very big deal at the time, and it took him away from another project he was working on—something like a rollercoaster, or not a rollercoaster but a ‘dark ride’ as they called it for Chessington World of Adventures. He’d just done a few pages of script when he got the massive deal to do Dirk Gently and had to depart from the project reluctantly. We managed to get a few pages of that into our 42 book. When I was first asked to go into the archive, it was for the radio series The Hexagonal Phase . They asked if there were any last bits of Hitchhiker that had never been used, so they could pepper it throughout the radio script. It was based on a book by the Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer, commissioned by Douglas’s family after he died. I’ve met Eoin, he’s a lovely guy. I don’t know if all the fans got on with the book—maybe it didn’t hit quite the right note—but the radio show was excellent. And we peppered in a last few snippets from Douglas into the script. So that’s why I’ve been asked to do this book project. It’s a picture book, not a biography. Facsimiles of his papers and his terrible, messy handwriting. His untidy typing full of blobs and crossing outs and xxxxxxxxxxxxx, deleted passages. There was a lot to wade through. I’ve been to the archives seventeen times last year, photographing, then reading it, logging it, working out the chronology. It’s a very similar process to the archive documentaries I make. It’s in vaguely chronological order showing his development and growth: poems from when he was 12-years-old, student comedy stuff, early radio writing, Doctor Who and early Hitchhikers material—the things that got him on the map. And then details of the projects he got invited to work on later once he was famous. We follow that whole story, through his tech company that he started and failed, and a couple that managed to get underway before the dotcom bubble burst. So, his whole life story. If you’re interested in how writers write, and in Douglas as an author, you’ll get something out of it. It will appeal to people of a curious mindset. And you could count Douglas among their number, definitely."