Saturday, July 07, 2007

Dirk Gentily's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

Those familiar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will already have some idea of Adams' style. For those not, from the academy dinner in chapter 4 (which reminded me somewhat of Sayer's Gaudy Night and somewhat of a Physics Department meeting):

the newly appointed Head of Radio Three, who was sitting opposite . . . had already been ensnared by the Music Director of the College and a Professor of Philosophy. Those two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase “too much Mozart” was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favor of any given program-scheduling strategy. The poor man was already beginning to grip his cutlery too tightly.
Or when a seriously stood-up lady calls:
“Hello Michael? . . . You said I should call you if I was free this evening and I said I'd rather be dead in a ditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely and utterly free, and there isn't a decent ditch for miles around. Make your move while you've got your chance is my advice to you. I'll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.”

The cover blurb in this edition (1987) garbles the story premise: ignore it. The story partakes of the nature of a mystery, with clues for the reader to catch, and other characters that actually don't enter into the solution. It would therefore be rude of me to explain which two subplots don't really contribute that much to the story. The Electric Monk is a little too much. And the world is rescued: no extra charge.

Nice light fun. Read it, and pay attention to the clues.

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