Just finished this book and really liked it (a good bit more then some of the latter entries in the hitchhikers guide series). But there were a couple of things I didn’t get:
1)Did the murderous eagle that kept trying to kill Dirk have anything at all to do with the rest of the plot (I have a strange feeling that he was mostly there for comic relief)?
2)Dirk’s client that gets beheaded at the very beginning, why did he get killed? I understand it he was the one with the “hot potato” or the envelope when Tou-rag and his monster came by, but why didn’t he just get rid of it like the rest of the people whose names were on the envelope?
It’s been a while since I read that one, but I seem to recall them explaining at the end that the eagle had been a fighter jet or similar that got transformed when Thor had his little hissy fit.
Why didn’t he get rid of the hot potato? He might have been greedy. He might have had trouble finding a patsy in time. We’ll never really know.
The eagle was a fighter jet pilot that was accidently transformed by Thor during one of his little moments. I forget exactly why he had it in for Dirk, other than that Dirk was one of the only people who would understand about the god thing.
Wasn’t the musician trying to hand it off to Dirk. I do remember that Dirk was supposed to meet him at a certain time, but overslept, and by the time he arrived the man was dead.
Well the job Dirk had was to protect the guy from the evil thing that was going to kill the person who held the ‘hot potato’, but it could have been that the guy was going to try to pawn it off on Dirk. Then again, it did give the dead guy some good luck, did it not?
I guess I missed the part where they explained about the eagle being the fighter pilot, but why was he trying to kill Dirk? Surely there were better ways to get his help then pushing him under a car or taking a chunk out of his nose.
Any clue why the decapitated guy only got to write decent lyrics to one popular song and nothing else? I remeber Adams goes into some length about how every other guy who’s name was on the envelope made a fortune.
Also was the contents of the envelope in fact the contract between Odin and the lawyer bastards or something else?
PS I know I should read books more carefully but I liked this one so much and wanted to find out what the answers were so badly I may have rushed myself a little
I believe the deal with the song was that the lyrics weren’t anything special, but the song got insanely popular and made tons of money anyway. It was similar to the case of Howard Bell (or whatever the name was), the guy whose books were always bestsellers, not matter how bad they were. Presumably he would have continued to have popular successes if he had successfully handed off the contract.
You missed that? I remember only shards of the story, but I remember that point. Hence the humor when a relaxed Dirk unfolds the newspaper in the last line of the book. We know (or at least suspect) that the eagle would have been re-mogrified into a fighter jet, and we know that it was locked in Dirk’s apartment. Dirk is probably in for a bit of a shock when he sees that first headline!
The eagle explanation is in a quick offhand comment one of the characters makes while discussing something else. That’s one thing that kind of annoyed me about the Gently books: Adams had a tendency to set up elaborate, mysterious situations and then provide a quasi-explanation in a few lines of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dialogue. It took me forever to figure out the ending to Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency because Adams just assumed everyone on earth knew the history of Samuel Coleridge and “Kubla Khan.” Of course, I eventually read Coleridge in college, and suddenly it all made sense, but Adams could have been a little less obtuse.
I also got the impression that Dirk’s client was a little dense and didn’t really understand the significance of what he had taken on until nearly too late, and then didn’t know how to convince anyone else to take the hot potato. (Wasn’t as persuasive or devious as the others.)
By the way… on a bit of a side topic… did anyone else think something was very wrong when the lawyer guy was ranting and raving about how the contract was not supposed to disturb their life, and that put the asguard-ians in clear breach of contract??
The hot potato clause was the lawyer’s responsibility, not the asguardians. The lawyer didn’t want to die, he passed the hot potato on. If he didn’t want the thing to end up next door, he should have made sure of that himself.
Well that clears things up a bit, thanks everyone. I also noticed that some of the really intriguing stuff in Adams’ books gets explained in a very small amount of text and is rather easy to miss, but he is still great. I find it galactically unjust that Yoko Ono and William Shatner are still alive and Douglas Adams is dead, just the kind of near-cruel irony that made his books so good.
Heh. I was able to get that bit because of having read the second Straight Dope book, wherein Cecil treated us to some self-administered tests. One of the questions (for which answers were provided) asked why Mr. Coleridge might have had a grudge against persons from Porlock.
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