A case for the holistic detective
I had Douglas Adams in front of the Marmite Mnemonicon once before, on Towel Day, and he spent most of it talking about everything adjacent to Marmite rather than Marmite itself. This time I wanted to put the question to one of his characters instead. Not Adams’s own breakfast habits, but his strangest creation: Dirk Gently, the holistic detective who solves cases by assuming that everything is connected to everything else. If anyone could turn a choice between two brown spreads into a cosmic event, it is him.
A reminder of how the Mnemonicon works. Each question goes through twice, once in grounded mode, where the cabinet answers only from what Adams actually wrote, and once in hypothesised mode, where it extrapolates in his voice and flags the speculation. Sedasoft’s siteengine_ai does the thinking; the brass-and-velvet box on my Norfolk shelf is the part I built. Editor’s note at the bottom, as always.
The interview
Me: Before we get anywhere near Marmite, Dirk Gently. For anyone who hasn’t met him, who is he, and how does he actually work?
DNA: Dirk Gently, whose full name is Svlad Cjelli, is a decidedly unconventional detective, and an improbable one at that. He operates on the premise of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, which means he believes every trivial detail is somehow linked to a larger cosmic story, however implausible that sounds. It lets him wander off into the most colourful tangents while purportedly solving a case, often using methods most people would call eccentric. He might link a missing cat to a case of time travel, or, more likely, to a ridiculous bill for expenses incurred while investigating it.
His approach is not what you find in the typical detective novel. Dirk does not rely on linear reasoning or the classic gather-the-clues-and-deduce method. He embraces chaos, on the belief that the apparent randomness of life holds the secret to solving the crime. That leads him to find connections in the unlikeliest places, plucking at threads nobody else can see.
In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency he treats the interconnectedness of all things as a philosophical lens for examining a mystery, which produces some astonishingly improbable claims, such as the urgent need for a trip to the Bahamas on the grounds that it somehow relates to the case. The truth, of course, is usually less about the case and more about his desire to escape the drudgery. He sees the universe as a web of connected phenomena, which makes every ordinary detail potentially significant, even when the wild theory involves a talking toaster or a cat’s lost collar.
Me: Good. Now the question I brought you here for. Forget your own taste. Faced with a jar of Marmite and a jar of Bovril, which would Dirk choose, and how would he justify it?
DNA: (Mnemonicon, speculation mode) Dirk would regard the choice not as a culinary dilemma but as a profound philosophical conundrum, one that encapsulates the very fabric of the universe. After a long pause, the sort that would bemuse everyone else in the room, he would announce, with supreme certainty, that he would choose Marmite.
The justification would run along the lines of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. He would point out that Marmite, being a by-product of brewing, is intrinsically linked to the whole universe of fermented things, including beer, which has played a rather important role in human civilisation. It is all about connections, you see. The thought of beer would then leap, like an excitable kangaroo, from one idea to the next: occasions in history where sharing a beer led to the signing of treaties and the founding of alliances, and very probably that time he spilled some on the fabric of space-time while trying to fix his time machine, which obviously ties in with the nuances of causality.
Bovril, lovely though it is, he would dismiss as merely a comforting broth, lacking the wealth of connections Marmite offers. Choosing Marmite, he would conclude, is not about taste at all. It is about embracing our past, our choices, and every tiny misadventure that brought us to this moment of indecision in front of the two jars. The whole thing would end on a note of whimsy that left everyone wondering whether to begin a serious discussion on the intergalactic implications of yeast, or simply have some toast.
Me: Marmite it is, then, and the Hate Party can take that up with your detective. Now earn it. Give me a Dirk Gently story where that choice actually matters: Bovril transmuted into Marmite, and only Dirk can work out why.
DNA: (Mnemonicon, speculation mode) It starts innocuously, as these things do, in a quaint café in Camden, where a disgruntled customer reports that his Bovril has inexplicably turned into Marmite right in front of him. The proprietor has no idea how, beyond a vague suspicion that his supply chain is as tangled as a cat in a ball of yarn.
Dirk, who happens to be working through a slice of toast at the time, because one must never neglect the toast, is approached by the bewildered customer. On the promise of a free and probably over-brewed cup of tea, he takes the case, seeing in it a fine chance to explore a genuine culinary enigma.
The investigation winds through a series of absurdities. He interviews a talkative beetroot farmer who insists the whole thing is a government plot to make people prefer one spread over the other, a theory Dirk nearly believes until he notices how much of his own product the farmer has been drinking. He wanders off into as much quantum physics as a man can manage during a lunch rush, proposing that the act of spreading Bovril and Marmite connects them at a subatomic level, and that in a parallel universe they may be one and the same. His long-suffering assistant Richard is, as usual, confounded.
Things escalate at a symposium on condiment philosophy, held in the determinedly mundane lecture hall of a community centre, where a roomful of eccentric thinkers air their theories, including a man convinced that every time somebody chooses Marmite over Bovril, a butterfly in South America flaps its wings and causes a small local weather event. With each daft connection, Dirk starts to see the threads weave together. The breakfast choices are not trivial at all; they resonate through the universe in unpredictable ways. The cause, he eventually discovers, is an ancient culinary spell miscast by overenthusiastic bakers at the bakery next door, an unlucky alignment of condiments and cosmic energies.
In a suitably comic twist, he ends the pandemonium by hosting a combined tossing of both spreads, letting the interconnectedness of all things work its charm. The patrons join in and produce a Marmite-Bovril hybrid dedicated to harmony between the two, and, much to everyone’s surprise, it turns out not half bad. As Dirk sips his oddly named concoction, he muses that it is all about connections. One man’s Bovril is another’s Marmite, and if that does not express universal interconnectedness, nothing ever will.
Editor’s note
For full background on the Marmite Mnemonicon, see the introduction piece. The short version: it is a thin wrapper around siteengine_ai, a project built by my friends at Sedasoft, trained on the published writings and recordings of a roster of dead authors.
The first answer, on who Dirk Gently is and how he works, is grounded, drawn from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Everything after that, Dirk’s preference for Marmite and the entire short story, is hypothesised: written in Adams’s voice, invented on the spot, and flagged as such. Richard MacDuff really is Dirk’s reluctant associate in the novel; the beetroot farmer and the condiment symposium are not. Nothing here should be cited as having been said by the real Douglas Adams. It is what a careful machine, trained on his papers, says in his voice when you press it, with the speculation marked honestly.
A small confession on method. This was one of the first interviews run through a new piece of plumbing, a Marmite tool server that lets the cabinet be questioned directly, which is why the tangents you have just read, the beetroot farmer, the kangaroo, the butterfly, all grew out of one threaded conversation rather than three separate ones. Dirk would approve. Everything connected to everything else.
