Dirk Gently Books in Order

The Dirk Gently books take the energy of Douglas Adams's science fiction and aim it at smaller, stranger corners of the world. Instead of galactic presidents and planet builders, you get a shabby, infuriating detective who insists that the only way to solve a case is to follow every connection, no matter how absurd it seems at first. Dirk calls his method "holistic" because he believes in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency we first meet Dirk through the eyes of Richard MacDuff, a computer programmer who stumbles into murder, ghosts and a university friendship he would rather forget. Dirk charges outrageous fees, lies as a matter of habit and appears to waste time on impossible leads, yet the story gradually reveals how a missing cat, an Electric Monk and an ancient alien ship all fit together. Much of the pleasure comes from watching throwaway details from early chapters snap into place hundreds of pages later.

The second novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, shifts from Cambridge colleges to modern London. It opens with an unexplained explosion at Heathrow Airport and a client who believes a green eyed giant is trying to kill him. Dirk, perpetually late and disorganised, is dragged into a plot involving disgruntled Norse gods, a sinister private clinic and music industry contracts. The tone is a little darker, but the logic is the same: follow the coincidences until they stop looking like coincidences at all.

Running underneath the jokes is a real affection for everyday life. Richard worries about his relationship as much as his survival. Kate Schechter, a central character in the second book, is preoccupied with delayed flights and terrible customer service even as her life brushes up against immortals. Small miseries and cosmic stakes overlap until you can no longer pull them apart.

Adams also folds in pieces of his earlier work. Elements from his unproduced Doctor Who story Shada and the televised serial City of Death are reworked into Dirk's world, from the time bending professor at a Cambridge college to the way art, history and alien engineering collide. For long time fans this makes the books feel like a secret remix of familiar ideas, but new readers do not need to know any of that going in.

The Dirk Gently series is short, unfinished and surprisingly rich. Alongside the two completed novels there are fragments of a third Dirk story in The Salmon of Doubt, but each existing book stands on its own. Expect detective stories that begin with petty human problems and end up rearranging the past of the entire planet, all told in a voice that treats ghosts, gods and grumpy secretaries as equally real and equally ridiculous.