For some, Douglas Adams is just the guy who wrote that weird book about towels, the Universe and everything else, but a few might know him for what he really is: a great sci-fi writer, working on several episodes of Doctor Who and, of course, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
In Dirk Gently, we get to see, as described by the author “a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics”. It basicly sums up the idea behind the plot that revolves around the murder of Gordon Way, very rich, very powerfull and very annoying, his trustfull employee, Richard MacDuff, who’s accused of his murder even though he only got to ran over his bosses ghost after he was already dead and has only done so because he sent the wrong message to his girlfriend, Susan, Gordon’s sister and was hurrying to her house to try and erase the message.
That’s the kind of weirdness you’ll find in this book and it compels you to keep going and those pages just fly by as you get to know Richard, Dirk, Susan and Gordon and solve the mistery around Gordon’s death and an electric monk (don’t ask).
To those of you willing to see elements of the Netflix series, unfortunatelly you won’t find much since Max Landis just used the name and the concept of Dirk Gently, which we see for the first time waaay in the middle of the book, and creates something different than Adams, maybe trying to emulate his witts and failing miserably, creating a total different kind of fun monster.
It’s not bad (the tv series), but to know Dirk and to understand Adams, you gotta read the book and see a lot of elements from his previous works in Doctor Who and a little bit of that adorable english humour.
I sometimes think that Adams is kind of like PG Wodehouse in that a lot of the enjoyment simply comes from the clever writing instead of the plotting itself. Then I remember how complicated and expansive his plots can be, even though to me they’re not the point. My PG Wodehouse/Douglas Adams analogy is not that strong is what I am saying. But in terms of writing I feel like Adams is largely about the undeniable wit and panache of his style over other considerations.