HITCHHIKER: A Biography of Douglas Adams
by M J Simpson
Hodder £18.99 pp396
Douglas Adams died in May 2001, aged 49, of a heart attack, while exercising in a Californian gym. He was much mourned, both by the circle of comedy actor/writers in which he moved and the wider orbit of internet crawlers terminally in thrall to the distinctive brand of comic science fiction he pioneered nearly two decades before. “Douglas, you left the party far too soon,” ran Stephen Fry’s valedictory tribute, posted — where else? — on the Adams website.

There are, it must be said, a lot of parties in Hitchhiker: champagne gatherings in various Adams domiciles, where the bottles lie stacked up in the bath; celebrity-filled roustabouts, where Salman Rushdie and his kind can be seen clicking their fingers to a houseband led by Pink Floyd’s guitar player. At the same time (despite some gentlemanly high living, fine wines and crashed Porsches), the air, come the final stretches of the book, has turned distinctly chill. Decamped to LA, tied up in vague-sounding multimedia projects, stuck (as ever) on a book promised years back, Adams’s last years seem oddly purposeless. The guests, you feel, were collecting their coats and phoning for taxis.

It was not always thus. Back in the mid-1980s Adams had three books on the New York Times bestseller list (a feat unequalled since the days of Ian Fleming) and pocketed more than $2m for the American rights of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and its as then untitled sequel. Clearly, there are several intriguing lines of inquiry on display here. What happens to an innovator in one cultural-cum-technological medium who wants to colonise some others? What about the relationship with one’s audience that a phenomenon like the Adams cult kicks into being? And what does this roller-coaster ride do to you as a person, as opposed to a techno-prophet?

This, perhaps, is the challenge. How does M J Simpson, long-term friend of the deceased, shape up? Something of Simpson’s approach (earnest, dogged, determined) can be glimpsed in the introduction, where he apologises to those left behind in the project’s slipstream (“Numerous other people agreed to be interviewed about Douglas but, because of my workload and pending deadline, I was unable to do so”) and thanks Adams’s widow and agent “for allowing me to write this book”. John Lloyd, Adams’s long- standing collaborator, contributes a cerebral foreword (“The point is, we find ourselves alive, and we must decide what to do about it. Stuff happens”) ahead of a forensic analysis of exactly how many people turned up at the famous Forbidden Planet bookshop signing sessions on — now when would it have been? — October 13, 1979.

The son of divorced parents, his childhood apparently forgotten by everyone who took part in it, Adams was educated at Brentwood school in Essex (“There was a definite sparkle in his style and he showed a flair for original thought”, one former tutor luminously vouchsafes) before proceeding to Cambridge and the Footlights (“When I went up to Cambridge it was great because I suddenly found a lot of people I could really get on with”, is the subject’s revealing gloss). Key influences were the Beatles and Monty Python. There followed a vagrant early twenties on BBC radio’s comic fringe, until the first radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 1978 ignited the blue touchpaper of his career.

Very occasionally, amid the celebrity walk-ons and the abstruse discussions of Python sketches to which Adams may just have contributed, a fleeting, elusive figure can be seen capering on the book’s margins. It is Simpson’s subject, of whom we learn, in odd parentheses, that he had lots of girlfriends (Who? When? What do they say about him?), suffered periodic bouts of ill health (When did they start? What was their effect?), was extremely tall and was prone to spectacular fallings-out.

It would be nice to find out more about these sides to Adams’s life. To do so, you imagine, would be to neglect that substantial part of the prospective audience for whom the revelation that the description in Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography (1980), of a giant spacecraft in the shape of a 9.2km filter-tipped cigarette, “could conceivably be a Douglas image” will offer such healing balm. No doubt about it, stuff certainly happens in Hitchhiker. As one biographer to another, I can only say that I envied Simpson his material.

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