Douglas Adams

The second Dirk Gently book by Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is a witty detective story perfect for fans of his phenomenally successful The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame, the usual people tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all. No rational cause could be found for the explosion – it was simply designated an act of God. But, thinks Dirk Gently, which God? And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 to Oslo? 'A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic' - Douglas Adams, on Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Continue this surreal series with the unfinished The Salmon of Doubt.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

For Dirk Gently, private detective, a simple search for a missing cat uncovers a bewildered ghost, a secret time traveller, and a devastating secret that threatens the future of humanity.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Patrick Book

Apparently I goddamn hate Douglas Adams for some reason.

Sarah Sammis

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency has many of the same elements as Adams's more well known Hitchhiker's Guide series: mentally ill robots, digital watches, time travel and the end of the earth.

Dirk Gently's story doesn't flow as evenly from scene to scene as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does but then there are so many different versions of the Guide that it's possible earlier versions were just as rough. It took me a while to get into the story and to piece together the different threads of the story.

My favorite characters are the Robot Monk, the ghost of Gordon, and Dirk Gently himself. Gordon's plight of learning how to be a ghost made for humorous and interesting reading. I had to agree with Dirk and his frustration and Richard's apparently random actions.

I liked the book enough to pick up the sequel. It's on my TBR shelf; I just need to find it.

Laura Mauler

I used to be obsessed with Greek mythology, and would sometimes think, "What if the Greeks were right, and everything is run by gods who are barely different than people?" This book takes it to the next logical level: if the gods of mythology really exist, how the hell would they cope in today's world? 

Update: Second time around is as good as the first.

Claudiu

I recently finished reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams for one of the challenges I'm in. It's been quite a while since I've read a Douglas Adams book (last one was Salmon of Doubt a few years back) but I knew I'm in for a treat. And indeed, it has the same excellent humor as we are already used to from the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[return][return]The main plot idea seems to be Gordon Way's shooting during a call to his sister Susan's answering machine and Richard MacDuff's (an employee of Gordon's working on a program to convert data into music, currently dating Susan) seemingly implication in the murder; even if Gordon Way is dead his ghost is still roaming around. Dirk Gently, Richard's former college friend, believes in the fundamental interconnectedness of everything and tries to help Richard to prove he's innocent.[return][return]However, this is just a small part of the plot, in fact a very small one: time travel, aliens and other ideas are mixed in to create another great and funny Douglas Adams book.[return][return]Towards the end I was totally lost since I had no idea what the Coleridge connection is. After some searches on the internets, I discovered that the novel cannot be fully understood without familiarity with Samuel Taylor Coleridge life and works, particularly The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan poems. I found some notes though on a website so things got clearer.[return][return]During these searches on the net I also found out that the sofa irreversibly stuck on the stairs is based on an incident that happened during Adams’ college life.[return][return]Overall, a great read, 4 out of 5 stars.[return][return]I can't wait to read the next Dirk Gently book, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Shape Mismatch

This hilarious, witty and twisted tale of an electronic monk, a time traveler, a paranormal, a ghost, a horse is everything I expect Douglas Adams to write about. 

About the plot: the book starts off at a massive WTF moment, drags through a lot of  I have absolutely no idea, of what's going on , throws in a few moments of clarity, and towards the end, amps up the plot in less than two paragraphs, and gives you an absurd, dissatisfying ending. 

Enjoyed each and every page of the book, and can't wait to read through the next ones of the series. 

I also believe that John Dies at the End borrows heavily from this one, both in terms of plot devices and writing style. If you like one, you must read the other.
Also: It helps if you don't visualize Drik as Frodo (from the netflix abomination).

Colleen

Having read other Douglas Adams books (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), I was already familiar with his writing style. It's the equivalent of going for a ride with the Mad Hatter on the Knight Bus. Sometimes confusing, always funny, and eventually you will end up where you are supposed to go. I love Douglas's snarky English humor. But I would definitely say his works are not for everyone. 

Dirk Gently starts out with a series of series of seemingly random people and events that wrap around and tie together as the story develops. I liked how Coleridge was tied in throughout the book. But I was confused by the leap made at the end. I wish it would have been explained a little more. I think I figured it out, but I had to look up the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to double check.

I’m re-reading the Dirk Gently books for a book club. I haven’t read Douglas Adams since I was in my 20s. This was TOTALLY worth revisiting. A delight of hilarious, cutting, rambly narration, an utterly bananas plot, and my audiobook portrayed Dirk and Richard particularly brilliantly. The running joke about Dirk’s frustration with his own unwanted and disbelieved-in psychic powers, which might just be him being really good at finding The Connectedness Of All Things, will never not be funny. Genius.

Naomi J.

Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency

A really fun read, not as laugh out loud hilarious as Hitchhiker's but a few pleasant laughs and one excellent long form joke

Liam Richardson

Kirsten Simkiss

I have to say that I don't find this nearly as fun to read as The Hitchhiker's Guide series, but it's still pretty great writing. One or two chapters in particular stick out in my mind as being particularly awesome. For instance, the chapter dedicated to explaining who Dirk Gently was as a boy and what happened to him at St. Cedd's had me howling internally at how ridiculous it all was. I also really enjoyed the whole police plot regarding Richard and the late Gordon Way. That being said, I did have some plot based complaints. For one thing, while I did find these segments particularly interesting, there was no true climax to the book. They kind of just stumble from one sub-plot to the next. It didn't make it nearly as engaging as it might have been. 

That being said, I can see how someone might enjoy making this into a TV show (although apparently the show doesn't follow the books at all because iMDB tells me none of the characters from this book aside from Dirk Gently himself are in it.) It would make a great mini-series, honestly. You could have a different genre per episode. One part horror story, one part cop drama, one part science fiction. The combination of different genres was definitely an interesting one. I just wish they had been better incorporated into one plot as opposed to three.

Overall, I enjoyed reading it but I don't know that it's something I'd reread regularly. As I have not seen the show, I can't recommend anything based on your enjoyment of the show. However, if you're worried about book accuracy, I can tell you that you can watch the show and enjoy the book and not be spoiled for either. This book is probably appropriate for all ages, but some jokes might go over the heads of younger people.

Interestingly enough, my thoughts on this second book are the mirror opposites of the first. I felt that the first book had interesting characters but a plot that seemed a little too non sequitur to really make sense. This book had a plot that came to better way easier but I found the characters (aside from Dirk, of course, as he has already been established) to not be as interesting.

First off, I love love love the concept of old gods in the modern world. It makes me cackle with joy in any book of this variety. From American Gods to Rick Riordan to one of my favorite TV shows The Almighty Johnsons, I'm a total sucker for immortals sucking at living around mortals. However, I can't really say I loved these interpretations of them so much. Thor was fine. He was sufficiently booming and bull-headed. However, ultimately, I wanted more out of him than just the normal cookie-cutter Thor stereotype. Odin was kind of frustrating as he was nothing like any normal Odin as compared the the mythology. Granted, he was supposed to be kind of being subdued about it, but all in all, he just didn't scream of someone who could have been a retired all-father. And Toe Rag? Where in the world did that come from? Regardless, the Norse gods in this book are more like parodies of the Marvel comics versions of Norse gods and weren't really as entertaining as I wanted them to be. They weren't bad, per se, but I wanted more depth from all of the characters in this book and I just didn't get it.

The plot actually made way more sense than the first book did, interestingly enough. While you can't even begin to predict how the two plots will come together in the end, as is the nature of ANY Douglas Adams book, I thought it was pretty clever. I don't want to spoil it for prospective readers so I won't, but the clues of how things fit together are peppered in as things go along. While I didn't find any chapters to be particularly awesome as I did in the first book, I feel that overall his storyline was much better constructed in this one.

Overall, I would say this is an unusual book in that I feel like you can safely read the second book without having to read the first. While I always feel it's best to read books in order, you can pretty much get a solid understanding of Dirk from the chapters of his perspective without having to read his backstory bits in the prior book. I definitely feel like 3 stars is fair as far as my enjoyment went. It was not a book that was as easy for me to enjoy as the Hitchhikers series. Still, if Adams's works are among your favorites, I definitely wouldn't give this one a miss.

Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency

Sian Wadey

Douglas Adams is a superb writer. That much is evident from whatever you read of his. I'd read Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy and absolutely adored it. Adams makes you laugh out loud and makes complicated ideas or stories simple and believable when they shouldn't be!
This was the problem I had with this book. I was on board for the ghost, the electric monk and his horse, even for the time travel, but the space ship for me was a step too far. I know that's a completely absurd thing to say, but I just think Adams took it too far to a stage where I was actually bored a didn't care. In fact I skipped quite a bit towards the end.
It took far to long for the reader to meet Dirk Gently as well. In fact, the book was really about Richard and his various problems. Richard was a brilliant loveable character who struggled with several things including wrapping his head around the whole concept. Dirk on the other hand was a bit of an arse. He spent the majority of the last third of the book sulking because someone beat him to an idea. 
In the end I'm quite glad that I watched the series first because I loved it. Stephen Mangan is a fantastic Dirk Gently that can be an arse and loveable and Darren Boyd is a brilliant Richard MacDuff who bumbles through the case, trying to clear up Dirk's mistakes. I don't think I'll be reading another unfortunately. 
Just a quick note. Adams is brilliant with dialogue and he has a wonderful sense of imagination.

Emmett

It's been years since I read Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I've forgotten how entertaining he can be. He writes science fiction with a dash of good-humour, capitalising upon the genre's ability to surprise and reinvent. He is a quiet master of trenchant wit. Moments of small chuckles occur over small details like how the domestic problem of maneuvering a sofa up a particular flight of stairs is not just stuck in the practical sense but rendered a logical impossibility a computer program can't even solve. Every line that begins a chapter is addictive, every line that ends it is a cliffhanger. Adams is comfortable wherever he is, and this book is a cabinet of curiosities, a room of odds and ends where the reality as a piece of God-written music is jammed next to a Coleridge Mariner cameo.

Sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. A passenger check-in desk at London's Heathrow Airport goes up in a ball of flame and Dirk Gently becomes very inquisitive.

madina

my image of thor in here is distressingly mcu's thor instead of anything else

Isa s

A lot of nonsense but somehow you can't really put the book down all the same.

Renee Delcourt

.....I really preferred Hitchhiker's Guide... This one was just..... Don't read it, I beg you.

I'm really disappointed with this, which is a shame because I was so excited originally. I think the book had some kind of charm, but overall it was too wordy, not fully placed in reality or fantasy, and left me asking more questions than were answered. I wouldn't recommend people start with this as their first Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is my favorite book of his so far.

There is a long tradition of Great Detectives and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. But his search for a missing cat uncovers a ghost, a time-traveller, AND the devastating secret of humankind!
(back cover)

2.5

I'm not even entirely sure why I didn't enjoy this novel. I think maybe that Adam's writing isn't for me.

Ben Nathan

So much fun. I guess I read it before, but this time, I remember it and loved it.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

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