Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Book Review)

For the record, Dirk Gently and the rock band Starship have nothing in common. Whereas the The Band Formerly Known As Jefferson Starship, Formerly Known as Jefferson Spaceship, Formerly Known as Jefferson Airplane built their city on rock ’n’ roll, Dirk Gently built his detective agency on something completely and utterly different: quantum mechanics.

So why even bother mentioning Starship, you might ask? Well, no particular reason other than to let you know that there is no connection. And also because this is exactly the kind of nonsense you can expect when you read a book by Douglas Adams.

Immortalized for his five-book trilogy that begins with the classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams is perhaps the most bizarre writer I’ve even had chance to encounter. I mean that in a good way, of course. But whenever I read his work, I repeatedly ask myself, "How does he come up with this stuff?" Anyone who has read the aforementioned trilogy knows exactly what I mean.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency takes Adams’s wit in a whole new direction (no pun intended). It’s an adventure that uncovers not only a missing cat, a ghost, and a time-traveler, but also the secret to life itself (on this planet, at least).

But before we get to the story, just who is Dirk Gently, anyway?

He’s a man who loves being a detective, but who prefers to play by his own rules. "I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder," he tells one client on the phone.

He’s a man who is always on the case, with the answer just around the corner. "My theory is that your cat is not lost, but that his waveform has temporarily collapsed and must be restored. Schrödinger. Planck. And so on," he tells another concerned client.

This may sound odd to you, but since Dirk has built his agency on the principles of quantum mechanics, a system in which everything seems, on some level, to be linked to everything else, it really all makes sense. Great detectives like Sherlock Holmes are concerned with small details and tiny clues that will help them solve the crime. But not Dirk. "The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the interconnectedness of all things," he explains. In other words, he likes to look at the big picture, view things as a whole. The term ‘holistic’ actually refers to studying or treating things as a whole.

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