Der Elektrische Mönch

Dirk Gently's Holistische Detektei

by Douglas Adams

Paperback, 283 pages

German language

Published Nov. 1, 2001 by Heyne.

ISBN:: 978-3-453-19908-8

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(36 reviews)

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a humorous detective novel by English writer Douglas Adams, first published in 1987. It is described by the author on its cover as a "thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic".

The book was followed by a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. The only recurring major characters are the eponymous Dirk Gently, his secretary Janice Pearce and Sergeant Gilks. Adams also began work on another novel, The Salmon of Doubt, with the intention of publishing it as the third book in the series, but died before completing it.

27 editions

jonn reviewed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

I understand why people rate it with 3 stars

5 stars

Let me get it straight: the ending is very Adamsian. I have an unsubstantiated feeling (one could say "a belief") that Douglas Adams never cared much about the endings.

The reason I'm giving it my favorite 4.5 is the pure joy of Adams capturing so many concepts from what is by now computer science folklore, but at the time of writing the book was on the forefront of software engineering. The book is written in 1987, mind you.

And perhaps that's another reason many gave it three stars. Adams, not unlike his character, really liked to talk about computers in detail.

Kevin B. O'Brien reviewed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

Review of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Douglas Adams is one of the best writers of humorous Science Fiction (which is how I am classifying this, though you could, I suppose, call it Fantasy). The interesting thing is that Dirk Gently does not appear until about the mid-point of the book, though he is mentioned in passing a few times earlier. And what Adams does here is to take a number of bizarre threads and tie them all together into a story that makes a weird kind of sense when it is all done. And Dirk ends up being smarter than you first think. I plan to read the follow-up, Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.