Searching the home, he discovers an envelope marked with several names, all of which are crossed out except for Anstey's, and gets his nose broken by Anstey's son while trying to question him. When Dirk arrives at Anstey's home, he finds the man's body in a chair and his head on a record turntable. Anstey had engaged Dirk to protect him from a green-eyed giant armed with a scythe, saying that it had to do with a contract he had signed. Meanwhile, ' holistic' detective Dirk Gently wakes up several hours late for a meeting with songwriter Geoffrey Anstey, a new client. The man is later removed from the hospital, along with his short-handled sledgehammer and a Coca-Cola vending machine, and Kate checks herself out in order to find where he has gone. The check-in counter is suddenly consumed by fire, and both Kate and the man are taken to a hospital with injuries. While trying to purchase an airline ticket to Oslo at Heathrow Airport, American journalist Kate Schechter finds herself in line behind a large blond man who also wants to get on the flight but has no identification or means to pay. In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul. The novel is named for that time on a Sunday, after afternoon but before evening, as the weekend had finished but the week had not yet begun, that occurred to Adams as a listless limbo of the working man: The title is a phrase that appeared in Adams' novel Life, the Universe and Everything to describe the wretched boredom of immortal being Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged, and is a play on the theological treatise Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul has been adapted for radio, and several plot lines appear in the 2010 BBC TV series. Adams had intended to follow it with a third such novel, The Salmon of Doubt, but he died before completing it an unfinished draft is included in a posthumously published collection of the same name.

It is the second book by Adams featuring private detective Dirk Gently, the first being Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is a 1988 humorous fantasy detective novel by Douglas Adams. Print (hardback and paperback) & Audio Book ( Cassette, CD)ġ-0 (hardcover edition) & ISBN 1-5 (US paperback edition)

Dark teatime of the soul