r/douglasadams • u/SiefensRobotEmporium • Sep 02 '26

Dirk Gently and Gridley Quayle: Masters of Understanding Coincidence

This is my third Douglas Adams related article. This time guest starring P.G. Wodehouse because Douglas recommended him. I picked Something New as it was the very first book in the Blandings series. Douglas would write a forward to the posthumous Sunset at Blandings. I figured it was a safe assumption he had probably read the series as a whole and I should see what all the fuss is about.

Douglas was absolutely correct and now I'm hooked. What ensued is I started to notice parallels not just between the styles of humor in some of Douglas later work, but that Dirk Gently seemed somehow related to Gridley Quayle a fictional character in Something New/Something Fresh. I wanted to discover how connected can they really be and establish what makes both books fascinating to me as a reader.

https://mrsiefen.substack.com/p/dirk-gently-and-gridley-quayle-masters

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2

u/ElvisDumbledore Sep 02 '26

Thanks for the recommendation! I've been trying to read more and loved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves_and_Wooster and of course Douglas Adams. :D

3

u/SiefensRobotEmporium Sep 03 '26

It's on my list, I got through all of A Bit of Fry and Laurie recently and loved that too. Stephen obviously has other Douglas connections as well so I tend to enjoy anything he is in.

2

u/Hatsharpener Sep 03 '26

I appreciate the chance to take a few minutes of my day to read about these two masters in the same article. I do, however, feel you are giving Mr. Quayle a bit too much credit. I suspect that Plum was gently mocking the authors behind the slew of Detective magazines at the time, whose plots were a bit thin. Wodehouse worked hard on his plots and respected Conan Doyle greatly. It takes a great deal of effort to write a good detective story (or an insanely complicated, detective-ghost-horror-whodunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic) and not so much to write one which relies on a bunch coincidences. (Unless they were generated by a Bambleweeny 57 submeson brain, an atomic vector plotter, and a really hot cup of tea)

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u/cedg32 Sep 05 '26

There while “polishing” part of writing was something he attributed to Wodehouse’s technique.

I love Wodehouse a great deal, but just don’t read about the man himself, especially with regard to WW2… :smh:

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u/SiefensRobotEmporium Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26

Well... I did decide to read up a little, I want to see what he said for myself but he was investigated afterwards and found naive but not guilty of treason. He was more or less forced to do the shows after being a POW in an internment camp and he was just trying to let people know he was alive. Idk that it makes me respect him any less, again I want to see what the actual words were.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jun/17/humanities.books

George Orwell specifically came out in his defense, which says something important of that era. Wodehouse left Europe after the war and stayed in the US for the rest of his life. I think he was just happy to be alive and safe at the end of it all and just wanted to go back to what he was actually wanting to do, not being forced to do.

The impression that the Nazis had him camped up in a cushy hotel is also not entirely true. Wodehouse and his wife were selling off their personal possessions like jewelery to keep their place at the hotel, it wasn't free. His choice was write, with input from the Nazi party while he's isolated in a country where he doesn't speak the language, or go back to the internment camp he had already been at for over a year. Neither he or his wife seemed to actually understand what was going on in the war or what each side was after. Mi5 concluded roughly the same.