8 Mindbending Facts About Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

If you’ve been watching the new BBC America series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency but have yet to crack open the novels by Douglas Adams, consider your notice served: you are missing out. While the show is fantastic and weird, the books are even weirder,and even more fantastic, diving deeper into the weird interconnectedness of the universe and providing a strong cuppa unadulterated Douglas Adams humor—equal parts clever, erudite, silly, and joyful. While most name-check The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books as Adams’ greatest contribution to the universe, Dirk Gently is arguably a more complex work, with more to say. Don’t buy it? Here’s eight mind-bending (and hilarious) facts about the other book series by Douglas Adams.
It All Began with Doctor Who
Douglas Adams was once a writer for the infinite BBC series Doctor Who. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he worked on two Who serials: City of Death and the unfinished Shada. Each story has elements that were later incorporated into Dirk Gently (Adams was an enthusiastic recycler of his own ideas), including an alien seeking to use time travel to change history and a college professor who’d been serving his post for centuries.

There Was Supposed to be a Third Book
Adams completed two books in the series, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long, Dark Tea Time of the Soul. He was working on a third, The Salmon of Doubt, when he passed away unexpectedly. The unfinished remnants of that manuscript were later published alongside a handful of essays in a book of that title, but it only hints at the possibilities an expanded series would have offered.
It Has Been a Comic, a Radio Show, a Play, and a TV Series
All is not lost, however: as Dirk Gently has grown in reputation and readers’ affection over the years, the character and story have continued in the form of radio plays, stage plays, various comic books, and now, a TV series with a big name cast.
[caption id="attachment_13940" align="aligncenter" width="550"] The Dirk Gently comic book, from IDW.[/caption]
It Has Been Adapted Before
The new Dirk Gently show? It’s actually the second TV adaptation. The first came along on the BBC proper in 2012, starring Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd. While a mild critical hit, it never found much of an audience and was canceled after one series.

Its Impossible Sofa was Real
One of the greatest bits in the book is about a sofa that gets stuck on its way up the stairs in one of the character’s apartment buildings in a way that appears to violate the laws of physics, rendering it absolutely immovable. The sofa does tie into the eventual resolution of the novel, and was apparently inspired by a real event Adams witnessed as a student at St. John’s College, which inspired the school in the novel. The story goes that new furniture was installed in one of the rooms before the renovations on the hallway and stairs was finished—and after the remodel was done, it would no longer fit down the stairs, puzzling generations of students.
It Solves an Age-Old Mystery…About Poetry
Adams works Kublai Khan, the famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, into the story in a wildly inventive way. For those unfamiliar with the work, Coleridge was inspired to write it after a night of smoking opium (yup) and dreaming. Upon awakening, he claimed he had 300 lines of poetry set out in his head perfectly, and he began to write. Halfway through, he was interrupted by a mysterious visitor from Porlock—and the second half of the poem was lost. Adams not only explains who the visitor was, but links that visit to the salvation of the entirety of human existence.

Its Author Has Trouble Following the Plot
The ending to Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency makes perfect sense. It absolutely does. But Adams doesn’t hold any hands on the way to getting there, and almost everyone is a little confused upon a first reading—or even when asked about it years later. Adams himself was stumped when someone asked him to explain the ending in 2000, 13 years after the book was published. “All I can say,” Adams admitted, “is that it was as clear as day to me when I wrote it, and now I can’t figure it out myself.” Luckily, someone responded later in the day with what is a pretty good summation of how it all ties together.
Its Title Isn’t Kidding Around 
Speaking of tying together, don’t forget the word “holistic” in the title. Gently preaches a universe where everything is connected, a fact that allows him to be a detective without actually doing any work, because everything leads to everything else. This is reflected by the famously complex ending—in which even small details and asides from early in the story come back to play a role, whether you realize it or not. It’s true: everything in the novel is connected, making it truly a work of mad genius.
What’s your favorite incarnation of Dirk Gently?