Dirk Gently
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Dirk Gently (also known as Svlad Cjelli and 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 Teatime of the Soul. Adams was working on a third Gently novel, The Salmon of Doubt, at the time of his death, although it may have turned out to be a Hitchhiker's novel instead if it had been finished.
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. In fact he is a con man, and the "holistic detective" label is basically an excuse to run up large expense accounts and then claim that every item 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 also fails every attempt at being a fraud by being rather good at whatever it is he is trying to fake his way through.
Dirk's career as a confidence trickster has been dogged by persistent bad luck: whatever bizarrely improbable thing he claims in order to get money always turns out to be true (or at least appears, by some improbable coincidence, to have turned out to be true), invariably in a way that means that he does not get the money, and often in a way that means he gets arrested, loses his house, or is otherwise severely inconvenienced. Similarly, his various attempts to make money as a fake psychic have resulted in a perfect success rate that leads to awkward questions being asked.
Despite these problems, he has been shown to be fairly intelligent; on one occasion, based only on seeing a man clamber up a pipe and a tale of an unusual conjuring trick, Dirk managed to uncover the fact that a man in Cambridge had access to a time machine. Admittedly, the final revelation only came to Dirk when he asked a child's opinion, as children have not yet developed the barriers that prevent us seeing something we don't expect. Nevertheless, he was subsequently able to work out a means of saving the human race from extinction due to an interfering ghost.
Dirk also claims to believe that the phrase "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" is incorrect, and that in many cases the impossible has a certain credibility that the improbable sometimes lacks. He cited as an example a bizarre case of a young girl somehow recounting the prices of the stock market as they changed, but merely 24 hours behind. It was impossible that she was pulling the prices out of thin air, but the only alternative, however improbable, was that it was all a massive hoax that brought her no practical benefit; the first suggested that something was happening that nobody knew about, while the second was contrary to a basic fact of human nature that they did know about.
Dirk Gently is actually not this character's "real" name; it is presented early on in the first book that it is a pseudonym for the much less memorable "Svlad Cjelli." Note, however, that this may not be his "real name" either; it is simply the name by which Richard MacDuff knew him at St. Cedd's College. Since "Svlad" took pains to cultivate a vaguely vampiric image (and then to vehemently deny that he was doing any such thing in order to give the notion credibility), this may be simply an alias intended to evoke Vlad the Impaler.
A dirk is a type of knife, and the verb "to dirk" is an archaic synonym for "to stab"; therefore a literal translation of the name "Dirk Gently" would be the odd phrase "stab gently". Dirk himself states that the name has a "Scottish dagger feel" to it.
Dirk was played by Michael Bywater in the 1992 TV documentary, Don't Panic.
