Having made his audio debut last year courtesy of Harry Enfield's vocal cords, Douglas Adams's holistic detective Dirk Gently is returning in Radio 4 and BBC Audiobooks adaptation of second book The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. And this time the Gently universe is set to overlap with that of Adams's other famous creation.
“There is definitely Hitchhiker’s/crossover,” explains Dirk Gently adapter-in-chief and director Dirk Maggs. “In this second series there is one particular idea from Douglas’s notes for the third [unfinished] Dirk Gently book which at one point he thought might be a Hitchhiker’s book. It’s a very simple idea that puts one of the Hitchhiker’s characters in the same universe as Dirk Gently in a way that I thought had enormous potential. In this series we find that the characters in both universes are inhabiting the same world, and I think where we’re going with this is something that actually resolves later on in Hitchhiker’s. It’s turning into a bit of a prequel!”
You can read more about the second series of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (coming to Radio 4 and BBC Audiobooks later this
year) in the brand new issue of SFX, on sale Wednesday 2 July.
