Douglas Adams is best known for his wacky Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. But his two Dirk Gently novels, while maintaining Adams' characteristic high wackiness, also carry a good deal of sophistication. In particular, before reading DGHDA, one should review Coleridge "Kabla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", since a major part of the fun and the plot revolves on Adams' peculiar reading of these two poems.

Mathematics enters the novel in several ways. Small little math jokes and jibes abound. for example, a 7-year old girl attending a don's dinner is conjectured to be "the new maths professor".

More seriously, the main character, Richard MacDuff, is a programmer whose current project is converting numerical data into sounds. He discusses this in some mathematical detail at times. Another character, playing with MacDuff's computers, sums up the first three terms of a Fourier series graphically. And MacDuff has written an article on the relationship between music, mathematics, and beauty, and which gets quoted extensively.

"With its combination of archeological, literary and mathematical concerns, maybe this would more accurately be described as "interdiciplinary fiction"? The story is disjointed in parts, but very entertaining."

Douglas Adams is one of the authors that I admire. I have read all his works. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a brilliant story. It is "crazy", but fantastic! At first it looked like something thrown together, but after some time I found out that the book is full of mathematics. It is fun to read it, because you have to look for cues, you have to search through your mind to understand things. It takes you some time to connect different parts of the book together. It is a great exercise for your brain and it makes you laugh. The authors imagination is unbelievable. It is definitely something you have never read before (unless you have already read The Hitchikers Guide Through the Galaxy). The content is completely unpredictable. It surprises you all the time. Each page consists of something you would never expect(not even in the wildest dreams). if you don't believe me, read it and see for yourself!