Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Richard MacDuff, a computer programmer, attends the Coleridge dinner at his old college, St. Cedd's, with his advisory professor, Reg Chronotis.  Reg has a horrible memory but proves to be a genial fellow with a talent for parlor magic.  After the dinner, they return to Reg's on-campus lodgings only to discover a horse in the upstairs bathroom.  Hmm.  Suddenly, Richard remembered that he had promised to take his girlfriend, Susan, to the dinner!  As Reg's phone was out of order, Richard rushed off to find a phone.  She did not answer so he left an ill-considered message.  He immediately regretted the message and set out to break into her apartment and erase it before she could hear it.  As it happened, Susan had become infuriated by Richard's forgetting her and thus went out with the odious Michael Wenton-Weakes, a wealthy scion with no talents beyond moping about his misfortunes.  Elsewhere, Gordon Way, who happened to be Susan's brother, Richard's employer, and the cause of Michael's most recent misfortune, was driving to his cottage and talking on his car phone.  He was recording a meandering message on a variety of random subjects on his sister's answering machine when the boot of his car bounced open.  Pulling over and leaving the phone on the passenger seat, he opened the trunk only to be blasted by a shotgun.  He was quite alarmed to be dead.  Despite being a ghost, he continued on to his cottage.  Eventually, Dirk Gently - one of Richard's college acquaintances - stepped in to untangle the evening's events.

While reading the novel, I was most reminded of some Dr. Who episodes.  As it happens, the two episodes happened to be written by Douglas Adams.  How interesting.  The story is often difficult to follow as early events are not yet interconnected.  What is this dark tower on a desolate planet in the midst of a muddy valley and what is the cause of the explosion?  Why does this peculiar door keep appearing in unlikely places?  How could a sofa get into a stairwell and then be impossible to remove?  How did the horse get in the bathroom?

Overall, an entertaining book and very much unlike what I had expected.  Dirk doesn't look like either of his onscreen incarnations.  Of the two versions, Stephen Mangan is far closer to the mark than Samuel Barnett.  The book feels rushed at the end, and I didn't follow the conclusion.  One moment, the characters have 2 minutes to save humanity and the next chapter they are in Georgian England to have a conversation with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Yes, of course, it is so obvious.  After having followed the ruminations of a horse in a field and the efforts of a Dodo bird to get fed some nuts, the resolution felt very rushed and vague.  The book ends with "To be continued...", so perhaps this was intentional.