Don't Panic

by Neil Gaiman

  “Hardback publishers on the other hand are completely geared to the fact that writers are always late and always difficult. In the past, every time I hit a problem (which was pretty frequently) there was no time to stop and get it right. It began to seem absurd to me that here I was, an author of incredibly popular books, so what I wrote was important not only to me but to a very large public, and I didn’t have a chance to get it right, and this seemed absolutely crazy. The more successful you become the less chance there is of getting the stuff you are writing to work properly.

  “Now I want to make it clear that I’m not being rude about Pan, who did a wonderful job in promoting and marketing and selling an enormous number of copies, but it is just not in the nature of a paperback house to deal with the problems of actual authorship. That’s not what they are geared up to do. So now that I have a hardback publisher I think this is going to make a huge difference to the way things go from now on.”

  “My lifestyle? It’s very boring. I do spend a lot of money on things that I don’t need, like fast cars, which is pretty silly, considering I only use them to pooter about town. I’ve been through this thing with cars before, as I’d always promised myself that when I had some money I wouldn’t do something silly like buying a flashy car. So, as soon as Hitchhiker’s went to number one in the bestseller lists, I went out and bought a Porsche 911. I hated it. Driving it around in London was like taking a Ming vase to a football match. Going for a drive was like setting out to invade Poland. I got rid of it after going into a skid coming out of Hyde Park and crashing into a wall by the Hard Rock Café… there was a huge queue of people outside, all of whom cheered loudly, so I got rid of it and got a Golf GTI. When I was in LA, I had a Saab Turbo, and when I came back to the UK with an LA state of mind I bought a BMW, which was nice, but I didn’t need a car that cost £24,000. Spendthrift is part of my lifestyle.

  “I spend a lot of my money in restaurants. Like Jane and I going off last year to France. We decided to have fun (which was about the only thing we failed to do). Everywhere we went the hotels were shut, so we decided to go down to Burgundy, where at least the meals would be good.

  “We arrived there late at night, and I had one of the best omelettes I’ve ever tasted. Unfortunately, it had some strange mushrooms in it, and I was in bed for two days with food poisoning. We were booked into all these wonderful restaurants and I never got to any of them. Then we drove back. As soon as my stomach was strong enough to hold anything down, we couldn’t find anything decent to eat. Then it rained all the time and we missed the ferry and had to drive to Calais, and I was seasick all the way back home. That’s the jetset lifestyle for you. Somehow it cost me a lot of money.”

  — Douglas Adams.

  Adams spent most of 1986 editing The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, spending less time than he had hoped assisting in the writing of the Bureaucracy computer game (“it involves you in a bewildering series of adventures from your own home to the depths of the African jungle, but the object of the game is simply to get your bank to acknowledge a change-of-address card…”), and planning Dirk Gently.

  “Dirk Gently has nothing at all to do with Hitchhiker’s. It’s a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics.

  “The strange thing is that while I was working on Hitchhiker’s I would always find myself telling people I wasn’t a science fiction writer, simply a humour writer who happened to be using some science fiction ideas to tell jokes with. But Dirk Gently is changing my mind. I think maybe I am a science fiction writer. It’s very strange…”

  ON SCIENCE FICTION

  Extract from an interview with Douglas Adams conducted by the author in November 1983:

  I’ve read the first thirty pages of a tremendous amount of science fiction. One thing I’ve found is that, no matter how good the ideas are, a lot of it is terribly badly written. Years ago, I read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. The ideas are captivating, but the writing! I wouldn’t employ him to write junk mail! I loved the film of 2001, saw it six times and read the book twice. And then I read a book called The Lost Worlds of 2001 in which Clarke chronicles the disagreements between himself and Kubrick—he goes through all the ideas left by the wayside, “Look at this idea he left out, and this idea!” and at the end of the book one has an intense admiration for Kubrick. I read 2010 when it came out, and it was like all the stuff that Kubrick had been sensible enough to leave out of 2001.

  What’s good? Vonnegut, he’s great, but he’s not an SF writer. People criticise him for saying it, but it’s true. He started with one or two ideas he wanted to convey and happened to find some conventions of SF that suited his purpose.

  I thought The Sirens of Titan was close in many ways to Hitchhiker’s. The Chrono-synclastic infundibulum, for example, if I’ve got that right.

  That’s right, yes. It’s funny, people make this comparison, and I’m always incredibly flattered, because I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. It’s unfair to Vonnegut, apart from anything else, because when you are talking about his best books (I’m not talking about his later books, where I can’t understand how he gets the enthusiasm to get in front of the typewriter and actually write that stuff. It’s like going through the motions of his own stylistic tricks), those first three were deeply serious books. My books aren’t serious at that level—they are on some level—but there’s a very clear disparity between them. Read a Vonnegut book next to one of mine and it’s clear they’re utterly different. People are tempted to compare them for three reasons. Firstly, they are both funny in some way, and secondly, they’ve got spaceships and robots in them. [No third was mentioned.] It’s the labelling. A much, much stronger influence in my writing is P.G. Wodehouse; he didn’t write about robots and spaceships, though, so people don’t spot it. They are looking for labels.

  There are Wodehousian turns of phrase in your writing. Like the line about “Aunt calling to Aunt like Dinosaurs across a marsh”.

  Yes, I actually pinched that line somewhere in the third book. I’m not sure where.

  The mattresses?

  Yes, it’s at the end of the mattresses scene, in the swamp. But I have to point that out to people since no one noticed.

  As regards good SF books, well A Canticle for Leibowitz [Walter Miller Jr] is a wonderful book. There’s also someone I came across because of Hitchhiker’s—people kept saying, “If you write this stuff you must know the work of Robert Sheckley?”

  I assumed you must have read Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles.

  People kept saying that, so I finally sat down and read it, and it was quite creepy. The guy who constructed Earth… it was completely fortuitous. Those are coincidences, and after all there are only a small number of ideas. I felt what I did was more akin to Sheckley than Vonnegut.

  As with everything else Douglas did, Dirk Gently was late. By the time it was finished, there was no time to get it properly typeset and to get proof copies out—something that spurred Douglas to become a desktop publisher. The book was typeset on his Macintosh computer (indeed, the proof copies were printed on his laser printer) and came out on time in Spring 1987—to mixed reviews. Some people found it more satisfying than a Hitchhiker’s book. Others missed the non-stop cavalcade of jokes.

  24

  SAVING THE WORLD AT NO EXTRA CHARGE

  Dirk Gently is a detective and a rather improbable one at that. He’s smug, he’s fat, he’s bespectacled, he’s a smartass, he sends out ludicrous bills with positively ridiculous expenses claims and, worst of all, he’s probably right. He’s the kind of person you only ever want to know under the direst of circumstances.

  Svald Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, “popular” was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular—everyone slows down to have a good look, b
ut no one will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it. Svald Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.

  — Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

  Douglas Adams knew nothing about detectives, or at least not very much.

  Indeed, so woeful was his level of knowledge that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was criticised for the sloppy way in which the author disentangled the problems he posed for the sleuth. (“Adams also violates cardinal rules of mystery writing by supplying readers with information insufficient to solve the crime and by introducing deux ex machina to bail out the plot logjams”, according to the Chicago Tribune.) If Dirk Gently was genuinely a detective the criticism might have been valid. But then Gently is really a con-man who has a disproportionate interest in the “interconnectedness of all things” and the workings of quantum mechanics. That’s what really fascinates Gently, and working as a private eye simply enables him to engage that passion and charge his clients for the privilege.

  “Of course I will explain to you again why the trip to the Bahamas was so vitally necessary,” said Dirk Gently soothingly. “Nothing could give me greater pleasure. I believe, as you know, Mrs Sauskind, in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Furthermore I have plotted and triangulated the vectors of the interconnectedness of all things and traced them to a beach in the Bahamas which it is therefore necessary for me to visit from time to time in the course of my investigations. I wish it were not the case, since, sadly, I am allergic to both the sun and rum punches, but then we all have our cross to bear, don’t we, Mrs Sauskind?”

  — Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

  As a whodunit, Dirk Gently doesn’t really hang together, since there is only one murder and, if you were paying attention, it’s fairly obvious who did it. Even if you weren’t paying attention, you get told before too long. So, if Dirk Gently doesn’t work as either a detective story or an archetypal whodunit, how does it engage any interest?

  Well, like all Douglas Adams books, it is funny. It’s an amusing and engaging romp through the spurious borders of the detective yarn. Within these parameters, Douglas constructs a hugely improbable tale which requires the introduction of a detective to unravel.

  There’s also Adams’s fascination with science fiction, computers, ecology, quantum mechanics and even a touch of fractal mathematics. The story in which Dirk Gently finds himself is almost incidental. What’s important is all the peripheral stuff which may, or may not, advance the plot.

  Both reviewers and detective novel fans were annoyed by the introduction of a bit of science fiction to get out of some of the tricky plot twists. This is understandable, or at least it would be understandable if Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was, in fact, a detective novel. But it isn’t. It’s a Douglas Adams novel, where the rules aren’t quite the same.

  Even so, Adams does take liberties, and using the time-travel trick is perhaps an easy way out.

  But there is plenty to enjoy. For a start, there’s Dirk himself, a thoroughly wretched character with few redeeming features.

  And then there’s the Electric Monk, perhaps Adams’s finest creation since Marvin the Paranoid Android. The Electric Monk was created to believe things, which would save their creators the trouble of believing them themselves. This is such a mind-meldingly brilliant ploy it’s a wonder no one ever thought of it before. But then no one ever thought of writing a fully realised “ghost-horror-detective-whodunit-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic” before either.

  The Electric Monk’s only flaw is that it has developed a fault and insists on believing the most ludicrous things, even if only for twenty-four hours. But when an Electric Monk believes something it will believe it up to the hilt, and nothing will shake its fundamental certainty until such time as it finds something more interesting to believe in.

  This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them all as well. This is why instruction manuals are so important.

  So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that thirty-five per cent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down.

  — Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

  Dust had not even begun to think about settling on Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency when Douglas produced a follow-up, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

  Here Dirk continues to explore the interconnectedness of all things. This time, the things that are interconnected include a new fridge, a Coca-Cola drinks dispensing machine (an echo, perhaps, of some previous episode), a self-immolating airline check-in desk, and the Gods of Asgard, one of whom, Thor, is currently an unhappy patient of the NHS. Now, normally that might be enough to spoil anyone’s day, but what really upsets Dirk is that his client is dead—so who’s going to pay the bill? Dirk is never one to let anything so trivial as saving the world interfere with the important stuff, like getting paid promptly and by someone living.

  The plot frailties of the first book were largely remedied in the sequel and Dirk Gently at one point looked set to become at least as long-running as Hitchhiker’s. As many novelists have discovered, the public loves a good detective. What’s more, they’re damn difficult to kill off. Just ask Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was dedicated to Jane Belson, a barrister and Douglas’s long-term companion. The book was published in October 1988, but it still took them another three years to get married. This took place on 25th November 1991 at Islington Town Hall in North London. The only reason it probably hadn’t happened earlier was that Douglas was, well, not exactly noticeable by his presence.

  Throughout the entire Dirk Gently episode Douglas was in constant contact with a zoologist called Mark Carwardine. They were organising, or attempting to organise, a series of expeditions to track down some of the world’s rarest animals. But, what with one thing and another, books coming out and needing to undertake world tours to promote them, that sort of thing, this would be another episode that would be three years in the making.

  25

  DOUGLAS AND OTHER ANIMALS

  In 1985 Mark Carwardine, the zoologist, and Douglas Adams, the extremely ignorant non-zoologist, went to Madagascar in search of the Aye-Aye, a creature no one had actually seen for years, at the behest of The Observer colour supplement and the World Wildlife Fund. Setting off for an island in pursuit of the near-extinct lemur, they caught a twenty-second glimpse of the creature on the island of Neco Mangabo on the first night, photographed it and returned feeling remarkably pleased with themselves.

  In fact, they were so remarkably pleased, they decided to do it all again, only this time with some different species of endangered animal and in places other than Madagascar.

  But, as Mark Carwardine was to discover, getting himself, Douglas Adams and a bunch of threatened animals together in the same place at the same time was to prove a logistical nightmare. And since logistics were not Douglas’s strong point, this was all left to Mark.

  “It was several years before we both had the time, as we were both involved in other projects, to set off and undertake Last Chance to See. But when we actually sat down to do it, it was amazing. We actually worked out that if we had three weeks to search for each endangered species and went for all the main ones in the world, it would take us 300 years. And that’s just the animals. If we had decided to include threatened plants as well, it would have taken another thousand years.

  “So we decided we’d be selective. We just sat down and I said: ‘Well, how about going to the Congo?’ And Douglas would say: ‘Well, I’d rather go to the Seychelles.’ And so we�
��d hit on a happy medium and go to Mauritius. It was a bit like that. We picked a whole variety so we’d get different kinds of animal. We had the Komodo dragon, which is a reptile; we had the Rodrigues fruitbat, which is a mammal; we went to look for the Yangtze River dolphin in China; the Kakapo, which is a bird, a kind of parrot, in New Zealand; the Juan Fernandez fur seal in Chile; the manatee in the Amazon, in Brazil; and the northern white rhino in Zaire.”

  — Mark Carwardine.

  Once they had decided where they were going to go, and in search of which animals, all they had to do was arrange a time. This was not to prove an easy task. But, by May 1988, after a year of anxious juggling and rearranging, the pair were ready to probe the darker recesses of man’s inhumanity to everything else he shares the planet with.

  With a self-imposed time limit of just three weeks for each trip, they set off in search of dolphins and dragons. And, on and off, they weren’t to re-emerge until mid-1989.

  Meanwhile, as is the way in all these things, other forces were at work. Heinemann had been persuaded to stump up a staggeringly huge advance to enable the intrepid explorers to go off exploring intrepidly. They also thought it would make a fairly nifty TV series.

  This idea was quickly dismissed after a conversation with the Chinese authorities. As Mark Carwardine explains: “The first expedition we tried to set up was the Yangtze River dolphin. We started making investigations, enquiring with the right people in China about permits for filming and all that kind of thing, and we got a reply back saying: ‘Sure, we can arrange for you to come and film, it’ll take at least nine months to organise the permit and it’ll cost you £200,000.’ So we put a stop to that straight away and then started thinking about radio.”