As I have left individual reviews on the individual books, this is more a review of the two books combined as a series.

As always, I enjoy Douglas Adams's sense of humor. I truly love his funny, quotable anecdotes about the little things in society that just happen to be unspoken truths. He has a way of putting things into a particular perspective, if only for a moment, that is both so true and so funny that it really sticks in your mind.

Overall, this book series was not one I particularly loved as much as I'd hoped. Dirk Gently is almost an idiot savant, in a way, and the plots are fairly non sequitur. If you're like me and you try to predict where plots are going from the beginning, good luck with that one because these plots barely come together in the end. I found the second book's plot to be more stable, but I enjoyed the characters less in that book than I did in the first. Still, there was plenty about them to enjoy and if Adams's style of humor is your long dark cup of tea, definitely don't give this one a miss.

É um livro divertido bem ao estilo de Douglas Adams, onde pode-se passar bons momentos com os personagens mas não achei tão cativante quanto O Guia do Mochileiro das Galáxias

Clearly, Douglas Adams is a genius. But actually, I don't like these very much. I found them much easier reading than when I first read them as (relatively speaking) a child, and I thought that, for this reason, I would like them more than I did then. But no.

Part of the problem must be that almost nothing could live up to the Hitchhiker's Guide, but even considering that, the Dirk Gently novels just don't seem all that good to me. They are funny in places, and made me laugh out loud a couple of times. But they are flawed. Both of them seemed to me to suffer from being hurried (I've heard that Douglas Adams often wrote in a hurry, and, according to rumour, after his publishing deadlines, but I don't think it normally showed).

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is apparently a re-work of an unfilmed Doctor Who script that Adams wrote in the eighties. That is probably why its story seems more intricate and coherent than The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, but it doesn't appear to have changed much in the re-work. We have Dirk/Doctor, a bizarre, larger than life character who is prepared to look beyond the ordinary, who is able to see further than others, and we have clients/companions, swept along in his wake, playing the bumbling Watsons to Dirk's Holmes (well, the usual stereotype of Watson and Holmes, anyway). And we have a mystery beyond the ken of any of the characters but the hero. And actually, that is where my problem is, I think. In both of the Dirk Gently novels, the central mysteries defy any kind of logic at all.

I have the same problem with the TV series 'Medium', which has a US District Attorney's assistant able to solve crimes by psychic powers, but unable to share her secret with anybody outside her immediate friends and family. The problem is that this is internally inconsistent. If she had the powers, and was able to solve crimes in the way depicted, there would be no problem telling the world about it, because she would simply be able to prove herself right. Dirk Gently is a little like that, in that the whole universe has to be bent around the character for him to be effective. The solution to the mystery in the first novel relies on (some of these probably count as a spoilers...) the existence of ghosts, the possibility of time travel, the invention of a time machine on Earth hundreds of years in the past, the existence of aliens able to cross interstellar space to reach Earth yet unable to prevent all of their deaths at the hands of a simple mistake, the ability of the ghost of one of those aliens to possess the mind of humans, and on the design of a machine on another entirely alien world sufficiently resembling a human that it can pass off as one without comment. Its a huge stack of ridiculous improbabilities that needs the Heart of Gold back in order to make sense of it all.

To get to the point; my problem with it all* is the whodunnit thing: there is nothing clever about having your character find the solution to a crime/mystery that you yourself have invented. Whodunnits must be told very well to draw you in and preserve the illusion that the world they inhabit is not the creation of an author who can pass the answers to the central character. Which is where (for me) the Dirk Gently novels failed. It's all too much. There is a lot of entertaining writing in there, but as a whole, the novels don't really work.

Incidentally, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul suffers from another insurmountable problem: a novel called 'American Gods', by Neil Gaiman. Same premise, handled slightly differently...

* Other opinions are available.

Quirky but a great read

These two books together were a really good and fun read. The mystery was more in how does the story come together than a true mystery. I enjoyed every second of the stories and found the plots very enticing. Highly recommend this for anyone who loves Douglas Adams writing.

Щось для мене незрозуміле... так важко втримати суть...

Wow, I had forgotten these books. They were a lot of fun.

Two great books with one awesome character that I may need to be for Halloween for another obscure unknown costume.

I was first given a copy of n  The Long Dark Tea-time of the Souln to read many, many years ago. It was great but when I noticed that it was the second in a series I was a little surprised I hadn't been given the first one to read. Now, I think I understand why. Douglas Adams is often compared with Terry Pratchett but it's a very lazy comparison. Both authors wrote a very British kind of comic speculative fiction at the end of the twentieth century but there, arguably, the similarities cease.

Where Pratchett has evolved into a top novelist, Adams was a brilliant writer of radio screenplays. Often, it must be said, his brand of joyous wordplay and comic meditations did not translate terribly well to the written page. Perhaps this is because he wrote sketches linked by a narrative, rather than writing a narrative encompassing occasional sketches, as Pratchett does.

The first of the books in this omnibus then,n  Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agencyn very much fits that pattern. Reading the novel, with its devices of time-travel, spaceships and alien planets, is very much like reading another episode from Hitchhiker's and the key character of Richard MacDuff, in particular, could simply be Arthur Dent. Basically, this story was amusing but not entirely satisfying. 3/5

n  The Long Dark Tea-time of the Souln, on the other hand, was even better than I remembered. Here, Adams leaves his Sci-Fi security blanket and writes a well-structured tale of Norse Gods coming to terms with life in modern Britain. Some of the themes, such as how belief effects gods, how they come into being and how they die, are covered in Pratchett's n  Small Godsn, too, but here they are treated less earnestly as Adams at last lets the narrative come to the fore. The characters, even the gods, are well drawn and believable and this is probably the author's greatest written work. 5/5

We watched the Netflix series of Dirk Gently a while ago and I remembered that this was still on the shelf, unread ever since I bought it in 2001 or '02 - special offer from the days when shops needed to get rid of goods with the price still given in DM after the currency switched to €.

I enjoyed it a lot, mainly because of the absurd and dry humour. I had meant to give only the first one a try, but since it was so funny, I read both books of this two-in-one edition. The actual stories aren't so brilliant, with the first a lot better than the second, though. The Netflix series has nothing to do with the books whatsoever, apart from the name of the detective and the idea of the 'holistic' approach, so both can be enjoyed on their own. However, it appeared to me that although even the appearance of Dirk, as well as his general character and background, was completely re-invented in the TV-series, his style of talking was true to the book. I could hear the quirky and fairly amiable, if very chaotic, Dirk from the film through the lines of the very little likeable (and really not actually very carefully presented and rather flat) character of the book, and that certainly helped me to engage with the books.

It's hard to put a rating on this book because I couldn't finish it. It certainly seems well-written, but is so scifi that I cannot get into it. I had watched a couple episodes and must do better watching scifi than reading it.

Another fascinating Douglas Adams universe.

Meh.