Dirk Gently
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Dirk Gently (real name Svlad Cjelli, also known as Dirk Cjelli) is a fictional character created by Douglas Adams and featured in the books Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. He is portrayed as an overweight 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.
Holistic Detective
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, 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. He maintains an office at 33a Peckender St. N1 London, with telephone number 01-354 9112 (407-2882 in the advertising campaign for the book).
Once a student at St. Cedd's College, Cambridge, he left in disgrace when on one occasion, attempted to acquire money by selling exam papers for the upcoming tests. His fellow students were convinced that he had produced the papers under hypnosis — in reality, he had simply studied previous papers and determined potential patterns in the questions. However when his papers turned out to be exactly the same as the real papers, to the very comma, he was arrested and sent to prison. This is but one example of Gently's odd facility for accurate assumptions: every wild guess and flippant answer he makes turns out to be absolutely true.
Personifications
Dirk Gently was played by Michael Bywater in the 1992 TV documentary The South Bank Show, Scot Burklin in a 2006 production of the play "Dirk" and is played by Harry Enfield in the 2007 BBC Radio 4 adaptation.
Further Appearance
Douglas Adams was working on a third Dirk Gently novel, The Salmon of Doubt, at the time of his death, but some of the ideas he developed were not really working within a Dirk Gently framework. Those ideas would have been salvaged, undergoing necessary changes on the way, and put into a sixth Hitchhiker's book.
