Dirk Gently (bornSvlad Cjelli, also known asDirk Cjelli) is a fictional character created by English writerDouglas Adams and featured in the booksDirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul andThe Salmon of Doubt. He is portrayed as a pudgy man who normally wears a heavy old light brown suit, red checked shirt with a green striped tie, long leather coat, red hat and thick metal-rimmed spectacles. "Dirk Gently" is not the character's real name. It is noted early on in the first book that it is a pseudonym for "Svlad Cjelli". Dirk himself states that the name has a "Scottish dagger feel" to it.
Dirk bills himself as a "holistic detective" who makes use of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person. This involves running up large expense accounts and then claiming that every item (such as needing to go to a tropical beach in the Bahamas for three weeks) was, as a consequence of this "fundamental interconnectedness", actually a vital part of the investigation. Challenged on this point in the first novel, he claims that he cannot be considered to have ripped anybody off, because none of his clients have ever paid him. His office is supposed to be located at 33a Peckender St. N1London. As an investigator whose cases often take a paranormal twist, he challenges the notion that – as presented bySherlock Holmes – "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth", as sometimes the impossible explanation makes more sense. To prove this, Dirk cites as an example an incident where a young girl is somehow reciting the stock market prices exactly as they change but twenty-four hours earlier. As Dirk describes it, it isimpossible that the girl is getting those figures out of thin air, but the alternative implausible explanation is that the girl is masterminding a complex scheme with no obvious benefit to herself involving her somehow acquiring and memorising the prices without anyone seeing her. The idea that she justknows the prices suggests that something is happening that nobody knows about, but the concept of a complex conspiracy that doesn't benefit the girl in any way suggests a scenario contrary to whatis known about typical human behavior.
Dirk is psychic, though he refuses to believe in such things, insisting that he merely has a "depressingly accurate knack for making wild assumptions". The "depressing" part is that he is seemingly unable to use this knack to win money gambling on horse racing. As a student atCambridge University (St Cedd's College) he attempted to acquire money by selling exam papers for the upcoming tests. His fellow undergraduates were convinced that he was psychic and had produced the papers underhypnosis, while he claimed he had simply studied previous papers and determined potential patterns in questions. When his papers turned out to be exactly the same as the real ones, to the very comma, he was expelled from the university and later sent to prison.
Dirk goes on to solve a highly elaborate time travel murder mystery, and accidentally answers the age-old question of exactlywho interruptedSamuel Taylor Coleridge while he was writing the poemKubla Khan. Along the way Dirk stumbles onto a highly improbable horse in a bathroom, discovers who really composed all ofBach's music, and fails to findSchrödinger's elusive cat.
Douglas Adams was working on a third Dirk Gently novel,The Salmon of Doubt, at the time of his death. However Adams said "A lot of the stuff which was originally inThe Salmon of Doubt really wasn't working," and that he had planned on "salvaging some of the ideas that I couldn't make work in aDirk Gently framework and putting them in aHitchhiker framework... and for old time's sake I may call itThe Salmon of Doubt."[1][2] The first ten chapters of this novel, assembled from various drafts following Adams' death, together with a memo suggesting further plot points, appear inThe Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time.