Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

review by Malcolm Martland 27th Jan
Kindle edition - (£2.99 but gone up since)
The BBC did a clever version of this novel shortly before Christmas but with some difference. It was first published in 1987/88 and as a bit of a cross between Adams’ own H2G2/Dr Who and Sherlock. It is also the first novel I bought and read on a Kindle.

But anyway from the back cover:

“What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an Electric Monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a Chronologist over 200 years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common? Apparently not much; until Dirk Gently, self-styled private investigator, sets out to prove the fundamental interconnectedness of all things by solving a mysterious murder, assisting a mysterious professor, unravelling a mysterious mystery, and eating a lot of pizza ….etc”

The synopsis was by the author so he clearly understood it, but if you saw the BBC Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency this is nothing like it. The Beeb did a clever cosy tidy up for Christmas abut a missing cat and omitted all the extraterrestrial, supernatural stuff. They both included Schrodingers Cat thought experiment though. Early in the book is a horse mounted malfunctioning Electric Monk - a refugee from a distant civilisation whose function when working properly is to have faith on our part so we don’t need to bother! Then there is the Cambridge don whose room is a time machine! He can't use the video recorder so he just time travels to last week's TV schedule to watch programs he's missed etc. Very weird! Bit Hitchhiker meets Sherlock! And of course they all end up saving the planet the universe and everything.

It was the first I bought and read on Kindle too so I didn't feel totally at home with the technique or the story! Not being a recent novel I found a few errors in the text – I am assuming that the Kindle version was prepared by scanning the original typeset and the OCR’ing it – unfortunately with a few – not many - missed recognitions left behind. Some of the older and free offerings for Kindle also suffer from this type of error. But I recently read Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (shudder) and the manuscript must have been in digital format and thus easy to transfer to Kindle with no text errors. Incidentally I’m now very comfortable with the Kindle – it is really nice to read, you can import Word documents and PDF – so I was able to read my son’s latest ScFi novel. But the only down side is that it needs light to read in the dark as there is no backlight. But if you buy the Kindle leather case there is a little pull out LED light that just about does the job – pretty low tech on such a nice machine.

Malcolm F. Martland Broadcast on RadioScilly 107.9FM 27 January 2011