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In 2001, when I heard that Douglas Adams had just died at the age of 49, I remember feeling an acute sense of loss. This was not only because I was, and still am, a fan of his, and not only because he was dead and at a relatively young age. Quite a few of my favourite SF writers have died during my lifetime, including Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and while I've always felt a sadness and a sense that their absence has taken some of the light out of the world, there's also often been the feeling (certainly in the cases of Asimov and Clarke) that they had a good innings and pretty much fulfilled their destinies as writers. It was different in this case.

I felt that after the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Dirk Gently novels, Douglas Adams still had a lot more to write about and would have taken his stories to some pretty exciting new places. There would have been another Dirk Gently book, of course, and then an embarking on who knew what amazing projects. Alas, it was never to be.

Instead, we have The Salmon of Doubt, a posthumous collection of Adams's articles, bits and pieces salvaged from his computer, and some rather fragmentary chapters of the third Dirk Gently novel (which is where this book's title comes from.) Reading it left me amused and entertained, as always with Adams, but also inevitably quite melancholy. I wish he were still alive.

The articles are a showcase for Adams's wit, his curiosity about the world and his love of technology, and have titles such as Hangover Cures, The Rhino Climb, Little Dongly Things and Is There an Artificial God? There is also - and this is poignant - a review of P.G.Wodehouse's unfinished novel Sunset at Blandings. He writes: "...But you will want to read Sunset for completeness, and for that sense you get, from its very unfinishedness, of being suddenly and unexpectedly close to a Master actually at work - a bit like seeing paint pots and scaffolding being carried in and out of the Sistine Chapel."

I say this article is poignant, because Adams is also describing something akin to the sense I get from reading what there is of his novel The Salmon of Doubt. There are eleven chapters in all, most of them featuring the eccentric and perennially disorganised Dirk Gently of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, although one chapter is about a rather laid-back, godlike person called Dave, who inhabits DaveLand in DaveWorld, and there is also a bewildered rhinoceros called

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