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Dirk Gently is a fictional character created by Douglas Adams and featured in the books Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. Adams was working on a third Gently novel, The Salmon of Doubt, at the time of his death. Douglas Noël Adams in an undated publicity photograph by Jill Furmanovsky Douglas Noël Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001), also known (to fans) as Bop Ad or Bob (after his illegible signature) or by his initials DNA (it is notable that Watson and Cricks famous discovery...
Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by Douglas Adams. ...
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul is a 1988 science fiction detective novel by Douglas Adams. ...
The Salmon of Doubt is a collection of previously-unpublished material by Douglas Adams, published after the authors death in 2001. ...
In Western culture, skeletons are often the symbol of death. ...
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. In fact he is a con man, and the "holistic detective" label is basically an excuse to run up large expense accounts and then claim that every item was, due to the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, actually a vital part of the investigation. (Challenged on this point in the first novel, he claims that he cannot in fairness be considered to have ripped anybody off, because none of his clients have paid him yet.) Holism (from holon, a Greek word meaning entity) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ...
A confidence trick, confidence game, or con for short (also known as a scam) is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the mark) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. ...
Dirk's career as a confidence trickster has been dogged by persistent bad luck: whatever bizarrely improbable thing he claims in order to get money always turns out to be true (or at least appears, by some improbable coincidence, to have turned out to be true), invariably in a way that means that he does not get the money, and often in a way that means he gets arrested, loses his house, or is otherwise severely inconvenienced. Similarly, his various attempts to make money as a fake psychic have resulted in a perfect success rate that leads to awkward questions being asked. Parapsychology is the study of the evidence involving phenomena where a person seems to affect or gain information about something through a means not currently explainable within the framework of mainstream, conventional science. ...
Dirk Gently is actually not this character's "real" name; it is presented early on in the first book that it is a pseudonym for the much less memorable "Svlad Cjelli." (This may not be his "real name" either; it is simply the name by which Richard MacDuff knew him at St. Cedd's College. Since "Svlad" took pains to cultivate a vaguely vampiric image, this may be simply an alias intended to evoke Vlad the Impaler.) This article contains information that is not verifiable. ...
Portrait of Vlad III Vlad III Dracula (also known as Vlad Ţepeş IPA: in Romanian or Vlad the Impaler) (November/December, 1431 – December 1476) reigned as Prince of Wallachia 1448, 1456–1462 and 1476. ...
A dirk is a type of knife, and the verb "to dirk" is an archaic synonym for "to stab"; therefore a literal translation of the name "Dirk Gently" would be the odd phrase "stab gently". Dirk is a Scots word for a long dagger; sometimes a cut-down sword blade mounted on a dagger handle, rather than a knife blade. ...
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