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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by…
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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (original 1987; edition 1991)

by Douglas Adams (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
8,848111315 (3.9)2 / 215
Member:keristars
Title:Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Authors:Douglas Adams (Author)
Info:Kindle converted content - orig. Pocket Books
Collections:Books I own
Rating:****
Tags:20th century, fiction, origin:britain, humor, form:e-book, mystery, speculative fiction, time travel, series:dirk gently, series, quantums, place:london

Work details

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (Author) (1987)

1001 (32) 1001 books (40) 20th century (45) British (101) comedy (144) crime (41) detective (175) Dirk Gently (179) Douglas Adams (89) ebook (37) English (32) fantasy (382) fiction (1,051) ghosts (40) hardcover (35) humor (1,047) mystery (323) novel (121) own (50) paperback (50) read (187) satire (40) science fiction (1,209) series (64) sf (156) sff (81) speculative fiction (34) time travel (132) to-read (34) unread (65)
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English (108)  Dutch (1)  Italian (1)  French (1)  All languages (111)
Showing 1-5 of 108 (next | show all)
One of the most annoying things about reading the Kindle edition of this book was the fact that popular highlights show up and you can't turn them off, at least not easily. It drove me mad. It was inevitably the parts that you'd pick out as funny for yourself, not anything surprisingly good...

Anyway, I grew up with Douglas Adams' work in the background, on the radio while we ate or while me and my sister played after dinner and my dad tried to relax. He's a big Douglas Adams fan, though he sticks mostly to the radio stuff, thinking that has more life.

I do enjoy Douglas Adams' writing, but I didn't find Dirk Gently as compulsive to read as Hitchhiker's Guide. There were a lot of good bits -- things I might pull out as memorable quotes -- but it didn't come out that memorably as a whole. The quotes are memorable without the story surrounding them. They're sort of bon mots that felt sort of pasted in, for the most part.

It's fun, don't get me wrong, and it was excellent train reading: entertaining without needing my full focus. ( )
  shanaqui | Apr 9, 2013 |
Good bits. Very good bits, as one would expect of Mr Adams. But messy and, for me, ultimately unsatisfying. I feel bad about myself for saying that, but I'm nothing if not ludicrously honest. ( )
  Vivl | Apr 8, 2013 |
I think it would have gotten more stars if Adams didn't take almost the entire book for any action to happen. And we don't even meet Dirk Gently until the second half of the book.

I do think that this could be hilarious in the way Dr.Who is hilarious, as a tv show...but as a book I kept falling asleep. Some of it was funny but mostly I just kept thinking that Adams should just get to the point and stop trying to force goofy on me every two lines.

Maybe I'll try #2 but I'll probably just watch the BBC show. ( )
  eidzior | Apr 6, 2013 |
Eh. I was amused but not enthralled. [Feb. 2011] ( )
  maureene87 | Apr 4, 2013 |
Refreshening. Irony will save the world.

Small advice: revise your knowledge of Coleridge's poems, they will come in handy to understand the ending and not feel a perfect fool, like I did. ( )
  Spell.bound | Apr 3, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 108 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (22 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Adams, DouglasAuthorprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Adams, Douglas NoëlNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Jeans, LionelCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Pekkanen, HilkkaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one.
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Epigraph
A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic -The author
Dedication
To my mother, who liked the bit about the horse
Janet Thrift
First words
This time there would be no witnesses.
Quotations
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
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Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one.

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

Book description
Wikipedia description: Dirk bills himself as a "holistic detective" who makes use of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person. This involves running up large expense accounts and then claiming that every item (such as needing to go to a tropical beach in the Bahamas for three weeks) was, due to the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things", actually a vital part of the investigation. Challenged on this point in the first novel, he claims that he cannot in fairness be considered to have ripped anybody off, because none of his clients have paid him yet. He maintains an office at 33a Peckender St. N1 London, with telephone number 01-354 9112 (407-2882 in the advertising campaign for the book).
Gently has an odd facility for accurate assumptions, as every wild guess he makes turns out to be true. Once a student at St. Cedd's College, Cambridge, he left in disgrace when he attempted to acquire money by selling exam papers for the upcoming tests. His fellow students were convinced that he had produced the papers under hypnosis—in reality, he had simply studied previous papers and determined potential patterns in the questions. However when his papers turned out to be exactly the same as the real papers, to the very comma, he was arrested and sent to prison.
Haiku summary
Dirk Gently says: "All
Things are fundamentally
Interconnected."
(passion4reading)
Your usual, run-
Of-the-mill detective-time
Travel-ghost story.
(passion4reading)

No descriptions found.

(see all 3 descriptions)

The investigations of Dirk Gently, a private detective who is more interested in telekinesis, quantum mechanics and lunch than fiddling around with fingerprint powders, produce startling and unexpected results.

(summary from another edition)

» see all 4 descriptions

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