The Salmon of Doubt

There was a period where I got heartily sick of it, and I really never wanted to hear anything more about it again, and I would almost scream at anybody who used the words to me. But since then, I went off and did other things. I did the Dirk Gently books. My favorite thing that I’ve ever done was a thing I did about ten years ago: I went around the world with a zoologist friend of mine, and looked for various rare and endangered species of animals, and wrote a book about that called Last Chance to See, which is my own personal favorite Hitchhiker now is something from the past that I feel very fond of; it was great, it was terrific, and it’s being very good to me. I had a conversation a little while ago with Pete Townshend of The Who, and I think at that point I was saying, “Oh God, hope I’m not just remembered as the person who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” And he kind of reprimanded me a little bit. He said, “Look, I have the same thing with Tommy, and for a while I thought like that. The thing is, when you’ve got something like that in your history, it opens an awful lot of doors. It allows you to do a lot of other things. People remember that. It’s something one should be grateful for.” And I thought that was quite right.

was terrific, and it’s being very good to me. I had a conversation a little while ago with Pete Townshend of The Who, and I think at that point I was saying, “Oh God, hope I’m not just remembered as the person who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” And he kind of reprimanded me a little bit. He said, “Look, I have the same thing with Tommy, and for a while I thought like that. The thing is, when you’ve got something like that in your history, it opens an awful lot of doors. It allows you to do a lot of other things. People remember that. It’s something one should be grateful for.” And I thought that was quite right.

Have you put Dirk Gently aside?

D.A. Well, I started to write another Dirk Gently book, and just lost it. For some reason I couldn’t get it going, so I had put it aside. I didn’t know what to do with it. I looked at the material again about a year later, and suddenly thoug “Actually, the reason is that the ideas and the character don’t match. I’ve tried to go for the wrong kind of ideas, and these ideas would actually fit much better in a Hitchhiker book, but I don’t want to write another Hitchhiker book at the moment. So I sort of put them on one side. And maybe one day I will write another Hitchhiker book, because there’s an awful lot of material sitting around waiting to go in it. But going back to Dirk Gently, I sort of put Dirk aside, really. There was a student production of Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective in Oxford two or three months ago, so I went along to see it. And it’s an enormously complicated plot ... Part of the complexity is there to disguise the fact that the plot doesn’t really quite work ... It was funny watching it on stage, because I suddenly began to think about it again, and think, “Well, they did this well, but what they should have done was this, and they should’ve done that.” You know, it starts the whole ball rolling in your head. What was also interesting to me was that while I was sitting there being quite critical of the production, I was astonished by how much the audience was enjoying it. It was rather sort of a peculiar situation. I suddenly thought,

“I would love to see this happen as a film, because I can now see, having thought about it freshly in this context, what kind of a movie it could be, and it could be great.” So maybe, once the Hitchhiker movie has gotten to the stage where I can turn my attention to other things as well, that’s what I’d like to do next. And with that movie under way, I hope more doors will open as far as filmmaking is concerned. I would love to do movies, but this is a man saying this innocently who’s never done one.

Interview conducted with Keith Phipps, 1998

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April 14, 1999

David Vogel Dear David, I’ve tried to reach you by phone a couple of times. Perhaps it would have helped if I’d explained why I was calling: I was in the States for a few days and thought it might be helpful if I came across to L.A. so that you and I could have a meeting. I didn’t hear from you, so I’m on a plane back to England, where I’m typing this.