Dirk Gently

Dirk Gently (born Svlad Cjelli, also known as Dirk Cjelli) is a fictional character created by English writer Douglas Adams and featured in the books Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and The Salmon of Doubt. He is portrayed as a pudgy 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, as a consequence of this "fundamental interconnectedness", actually a vital part of the investigation. Challenged on this point in the first novel, he claims that he cannot be considered to have ripped anybody off, because none of his clients have ever paid him. His office is supposed to be located at 33a Peckender St. N1 London. As an investigator whose cases often take a paranormal twist, he challenges the notion that – as presented by Sherlock Holmes – "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth", as sometimes the impossible explanation makes more sense. To prove this, Dirk cites as an example an incident where a young girl is somehow reciting the stock market prices exactly as they change but twenty-four hours earlier. As Dirk describes it, it is impossible that the girl is getting those figures out of thin air, but the alternative implausible explanation is that the girl is masterminding a complex scheme with no obvious benefit to herself involving her somehow acquiring and memorising the prices without anyone seeing her. The idea that she just knows the prices suggests that something is happening that nobody knows about, but the concept of a complex conspiracy that doesn't benefit the girl in any way suggests a scenario contrary to what is known about typical human behavior. Dirk is psychic, though he refuses to believe in such things, insisting that he merely has a "depressingly accurate knack for making wild assumptions".