Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by the British writer Douglas Adams, published in 1987. It is his first book after the Hitchhiker's Guide sequence, and it introduces Dirk Gently, whose method is to assume that everything in the universe is connected and then investigate whichever coincidence presents itself.

Richard MacDuff is a programmer who discovers that his employer, Gordon Way, intends to sell a system that would allow its owner to alter the past. He approaches Dirk Gently for help, and the case takes in a Cambridge professor, a horse that ends up in a bathroom, the building of a software empire and a ghost. The novel ties its loose ends together at the last moment using the logic the detective has been applying throughout.

Adams adapted material from an earlier television script, and he wrote the book with the same comic tone as the Hitchhiker novels but a different kind of plot, closer to a detective story. It was followed by The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.