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| The shiny brass plaque of professionalism. |
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
In his brief half-century of life, the writer Douglas Adams produced both less than one might imagine given the depth of his influence on western SF culture, and more than a lot of people know. A good fifty percent of his actual published writing and at least ninety of his enduring legacy is encompassed by the multi-media, multi-canoned Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise, and a good deal of the rest (of the former, if not the latter) by the two novels and incomplete fragments of the third in the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series.
An odd beast, the original novel is a mash-up of two Doctor Who scripts - Shada, which was never completed due to industrial action, and City of Death, which was filmed in Paris as a cheap holiday for the cast or something and is remembered as one of the all-time classics - with all-new characters save only for Professor Chronotis, an eccentric and possibly immortal Cambridge academic whose rooms are in fact a time machine. Central to the narrative is Dirk Gently - originally named Svlad Cjelli - a self-styled holistic detective whose method of solving crimes by seeking the interconnectedness of all things closely resembles a mixture of grotesque emotional manipulation and dumb luck. He returned in a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and a third novel, The Salmon of Doubt was at the work in progress stage when Adams died, although it is telling of the weight of his own legacy that he had expressed doubts as to whether it wasn't actually another HitchHiker novel.
Thus the entirety of the Dirk Gently series was a pair of modestly received novels with way, way more ideas than either story or character. Not to say that they were bad, although in truth I've never got on with Adams' novels as well as I have his screen and radio writing; something about the pace of reading makes the flaws in his characters - and especially his female characters, although fair play, Kate Schechter in Tea-Time is one of his better efforts - that little bit more glaring perhaps.
It took a long time for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency to get adapted, but by heck it's making up for lost time now. First up, namesake Dirk Maggs came off his adaptation of the remaining Hitch-Hiker novels on a high and went straight into producing a radio adaptation of the two novels starring Harry Enfield as Dirk Gently (and the late Andrew Sachs as Professor Chronotis, which is slightly disconcerting as he played the villainous Skagra in the audio revival of Shada, who murders that version of Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord.) Debuting in 2007, twenty years after the publication of the novel, to a mixed reception, I personally felt that they did an excellent job of capturing the feel of the novels, and in fact it was only on listening that I really understood how the end of the first novel worked(1).
It was intended that the same crew would then tackle The Salmon of Doubt, but for Reasons(TM) it never happened. Either causally or consequentially, Dirk Maggs left Above the Title Productions to found his own production company, and I guess that Above the Title was left with the rights to the third series, but not the driving force.
The property then languished for all of two years, before BBC4 hit us with Dirk Gently, a pilot for a proposed series starring Stephen Mangan as Gently. This series departed dramatically from the novel in a number of ways, not least by making the bemused everyman character Richard Macduff almost as much of a dick as Gently himself, as well as removing Professor Chronotis, the Electric Monk and about eighty percent of the hardcore weirdness and front and centering Gently's secretary's pathological fixation on her employer in a way that, astonishingly, resulted in a worse-written female character than the one in the novel. There was also a bleakness to it that seemed at odds with a certain sense of wonder, or at least the search for wonder in a life that insists on making marvels commonplace, that feels key to Dirk Gently as a character.
Once more speaking purely from my own perspective, I was not a fan of the pilot, although I felt that the series was improving before it got canned after three episodes, pulling in ideas from the two novels and removing some of the antagonism from the Macduff/Gently relationship to make the characters a little less abrasive. The overall response was positive, but not enough for BBC4 to overcome the BBC's natural and deep-seated aversion to producing non-Doctor Who SF programming. There's something fundamental in the BBC psyche that seems to insist that SF and fantasy programing is intrinsically silly and shouldn't be taken seriously, with the result that the Corporation produces almost nothing in these fields that is not on some level parody, and if it does will ensure that such programmes are derided as 'trashy fun' at best in their official listings magazine.
But you know who isn't ashamed of making SF? That's right; America. Thus it is that Dirk Gently has been exported, courtesy of IDW Publishing, who began running their Dirk Gently comic strip in 2015 and collaborated with BBC America and Netflix to bring him back to the screen in 2016, this time played by jobbing thesp Samuel Barnett. It is notable that in both media, Gently remains unassailably British (of possibly Transylvanian extraction,) although they are set in the US. Apparently something about the character resists characterisation as anything but a middle-class white Brit. Fair play, Barnett manages to combine wholesome and creepy to great effect. The rest of the cast are right at home in the new territory, however, and the original supporting cast are gone along with the matching plots.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is an eight-part serial, in which Dirk teams up with Todd, a downtrodden bellhop played by Elijah Wood, to investigate the murder of a billionaire, the disappearance of his daughter and all manner of associated weirdness. It has time travel, body-swapping, gunfights, a holistic assassin who follows the same pattern of beliefs as Dirk, but is possessed of a deep certainty that the world guides her to kill those who need to be killed in some way, and a shark in the body of a kitten. Once more then, the original story is jettisoned, and the writing style is sufficiently different to that of the original that it is really glaring when they drop in something lifted directly. The series casts Gently as one of a number of individuals with a unique and erratic connection with fate, which is rarely of any great advantage to him, but which he hopes may be of help to others. He's younger in spirit and less cynical than earlier incarnations, with his constant manipulation due more to deeply flawed social skills and possible autistic tendencies(2). Todd is an intensely dislikable character, which provides little contrast with Gently, but is worked for an effective antagonism as both work towards their eventual redemption.
Of course, I'm not sure that redemption really suits Gently; it sort of hinges on a sense of shame that the original character certainly never showed much sign of, given his struggles with guilt in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm also dubious as to whether British absurdist SF benefits from gun battles, and vice versa. I didn't hate the series, but it feels as if - and the same is true of Dirk Gently - it's not actually Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so much as a very different thing using a lot of the same ideas.
I miss the original storylines in the TV versions, and what replaces it never has quite the same timbre of weirdness; that is, they're weird, but it's their own kind of weirdness, in an adaptation of a novel whose native brand of weirdness feels at least as intrinsic to the work as any of the characters. Neither series has been terrible, but neither series has been, deep down, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency because neither of them has, deep down, really had a Dirk Gently to its name.
Dirk Gently was born as a human expee of the Doctor, and perhaps as a result is almost as hard to get a solid handle on as the Time Lord himself. It's hard to say why some Doctors work for us and some don't, but we all(3) have distinct ideas about when a Doctor 'isn't quite right'. I'm not sure that there is yet a definitive interpretation of Gently. They all have something, but none of them have everything. Enfield was excellent, but ultimately lacked a final quality of essential vigor, perhaps a consequence of picking a proven comic talent over an untried youth. Mangan's Gently was as coolly manipulative as any Sherlock, but more obsessive in his pursuit of answers than driven by an often-inappropriate joie de vivre in discovery. Barnett's is more of an enigma, even to himself, and probably the most complex of the bunch, possibly even including the novels, which are as I say notable move for complexity of ideas than of character. The thing of it is... Dirk Gently is not a character who is an enigma to himself, at least not knowingly so. Anyone who can pursue investigations by following random strangers and have the neck to charge for it can't be consciously harbouring any serious doubts as to their calling.
For myself, and for what it's worth, I would rate the various media as follows:
(1) It helps to know that 'Kubla Khan' is a fragment, but Adams himself has admitted to not being able to quite fit the end together when he went back to it.
(2) It's not explicit, and there are few people - even fewer in fiction - who don't fit one or more criteria or definitions of autism.
(3) All encompassing here the particular subset of Doctor Who fans.
In his brief half-century of life, the writer Douglas Adams produced both less than one might imagine given the depth of his influence on western SF culture, and more than a lot of people know. A good fifty percent of his actual published writing and at least ninety of his enduring legacy is encompassed by the multi-media, multi-canoned Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise, and a good deal of the rest (of the former, if not the latter) by the two novels and incomplete fragments of the third in the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series.
An odd beast, the original novel is a mash-up of two Doctor Who scripts - Shada, which was never completed due to industrial action, and City of Death, which was filmed in Paris as a cheap holiday for the cast or something and is remembered as one of the all-time classics - with all-new characters save only for Professor Chronotis, an eccentric and possibly immortal Cambridge academic whose rooms are in fact a time machine. Central to the narrative is Dirk Gently - originally named Svlad Cjelli - a self-styled holistic detective whose method of solving crimes by seeking the interconnectedness of all things closely resembles a mixture of grotesque emotional manipulation and dumb luck. He returned in a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and a third novel, The Salmon of Doubt was at the work in progress stage when Adams died, although it is telling of the weight of his own legacy that he had expressed doubts as to whether it wasn't actually another HitchHiker novel.
Thus the entirety of the Dirk Gently series was a pair of modestly received novels with way, way more ideas than either story or character. Not to say that they were bad, although in truth I've never got on with Adams' novels as well as I have his screen and radio writing; something about the pace of reading makes the flaws in his characters - and especially his female characters, although fair play, Kate Schechter in Tea-Time is one of his better efforts - that little bit more glaring perhaps.
 |
| The Electric Monk is one of many key concepts dropped from most other adaptations. |
It was intended that the same crew would then tackle The Salmon of Doubt, but for Reasons(TM) it never happened. Either causally or consequentially, Dirk Maggs left Above the Title Productions to found his own production company, and I guess that Above the Title was left with the rights to the third series, but not the driving force.
The property then languished for all of two years, before BBC4 hit us with Dirk Gently, a pilot for a proposed series starring Stephen Mangan as Gently. This series departed dramatically from the novel in a number of ways, not least by making the bemused everyman character Richard Macduff almost as much of a dick as Gently himself, as well as removing Professor Chronotis, the Electric Monk and about eighty percent of the hardcore weirdness and front and centering Gently's secretary's pathological fixation on her employer in a way that, astonishingly, resulted in a worse-written female character than the one in the novel. There was also a bleakness to it that seemed at odds with a certain sense of wonder, or at least the search for wonder in a life that insists on making marvels commonplace, that feels key to Dirk Gently as a character.
 |
| In the series Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently runs a holistic detective agency. |
But you know who isn't ashamed of making SF? That's right; America. Thus it is that Dirk Gently has been exported, courtesy of IDW Publishing, who began running their Dirk Gently comic strip in 2015 and collaborated with BBC America and Netflix to bring him back to the screen in 2016, this time played by jobbing thesp Samuel Barnett. It is notable that in both media, Gently remains unassailably British (of possibly Transylvanian extraction,) although they are set in the US. Apparently something about the character resists characterisation as anything but a middle-class white Brit. Fair play, Barnett manages to combine wholesome and creepy to great effect. The rest of the cast are right at home in the new territory, however, and the original supporting cast are gone along with the matching plots.
 |
| That hair though... |
Of course, I'm not sure that redemption really suits Gently; it sort of hinges on a sense of shame that the original character certainly never showed much sign of, given his struggles with guilt in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm also dubious as to whether British absurdist SF benefits from gun battles, and vice versa. I didn't hate the series, but it feels as if - and the same is true of Dirk Gently - it's not actually Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so much as a very different thing using a lot of the same ideas.
 |
| In the series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Dirk Gently does not run a holistic detective agency. |
Dirk Gently was born as a human expee of the Doctor, and perhaps as a result is almost as hard to get a solid handle on as the Time Lord himself. It's hard to say why some Doctors work for us and some don't, but we all(3) have distinct ideas about when a Doctor 'isn't quite right'. I'm not sure that there is yet a definitive interpretation of Gently. They all have something, but none of them have everything. Enfield was excellent, but ultimately lacked a final quality of essential vigor, perhaps a consequence of picking a proven comic talent over an untried youth. Mangan's Gently was as coolly manipulative as any Sherlock, but more obsessive in his pursuit of answers than driven by an often-inappropriate joie de vivre in discovery. Barnett's is more of an enigma, even to himself, and probably the most complex of the bunch, possibly even including the novels, which are as I say notable move for complexity of ideas than of character. The thing of it is... Dirk Gently is not a character who is an enigma to himself, at least not knowingly so. Anyone who can pursue investigations by following random strangers and have the neck to charge for it can't be consciously harbouring any serious doubts as to their calling.
For myself, and for what it's worth, I would rate the various media as follows:
- The radio series. I like audio, and I like Adams on audio especially.
- The novels. I know it may be sacrilege, but see above re me and Adams' novels.
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
- Dirk Gently.
(1) It helps to know that 'Kubla Khan' is a fragment, but Adams himself has admitted to not being able to quite fit the end together when he went back to it.
(2) It's not explicit, and there are few people - even fewer in fiction - who don't fit one or more criteria or definitions of autism.
(3) All encompassing here the particular subset of Doctor Who fans.
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