Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

One of the most comedic books I’ve ever read. Actually, I listened to the audiobook, which is expertly read by the author, the late great Douglas Adams.

Between his British accent and speedy and offhanded reading style, Adams whistles listeners through this book. I hit “pause” or “rewind” many times to laugh or to re-listen to his cavalcade of hysterical situations and dialogue. Dirk Gently is truly an original character. Otherworldly and somewhat metaphysical, this is one of my all-time favorite novels. The audacity of Douglas Adams. I love it.

I love Adams, but his Dirk Gently books get skipped too often. I find the main character’s situations and solutions infinitely fun.

The book is a classic and kept me reading while trying to figure out what exactly is going on, as there are so many hidden jokes. A re-read is most rewarding! I’ve never encountered so many science principles stuffed between the pages of a comedy.

Looking through the small ads in the back of my parents’ newspaper (we got really bored before the internet), I saw one for a holistic detective agency – ‘missing cats and messy divorces a speciality’. My sister dared me to call. When I did, I heard a message saying, ‘This is Dirk Gently. If you’d like to leave a message, you can’t.’ It then revealed the existence of the book, which of course I bought.

It’s my favourite Douglas Adams: set in the real world, but standing at a finely calculated distance from reality. There’s the character who’s killed early… show more.

Once again, I love the over-the-topness of Douglas Adams.

When most of life is spent in offices where people describe each other as wacky if they so much as make a face (we’ve all been there) or where being called silly is an insult, it’s great to enter a world that goes waaaay farther than that. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so naturally, I won’t. If you’re checking out a list like this, you don’t need me to tell you about it. Instead, let’s talk about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. If you saw any of the 2016 BBC series based on the book–it’s nothing like that. It’s probably not much like the 2010 BBC series, either, but I never saw it, so who knows? In any event, if you enjoyed the classic humor of H2G2, Adams’s bizarre detective novel will help satisfy the craving for… show more.

Adams described this as a “detective-ghost-horror-whodunit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic,” and I love this book in part because of how well it blends genres—something I do in my own stories. Humor, in particular, is hard enough to pull off, and other than the occasional hard-boiled wisecrack, most detective fiction doesn’t have a whole lot. Adams not only tells a ripping yarn, you’ll snort and chuckle all the way through.