Adams' posthumous wander

Douglas Adams died of a heart attack in May 2001

By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Online entertainment staff

Of all the genres of fiction, comedy is the hardest to sustain for any length of time.

Douglas Adams wrote three hysterically funny novels - the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe and Everything.

His premature death from a heart attack one year ago robbed fans of a truly funny writer, who was also an ambassador for technology, an ecologist and - by all accounts - a genuinely nice guy.

Adams suffered chronic writer's block, and his fourth and fifth Hitchhiker's books - So Long And Thanks for All the Fish, and Mostly Harmless - fell short of their predecessors.

It is a painful reminder of Adams' genius

It was Franz Kafka who asked for his unpublished papers - including the Trial and the Castle - to be burnt after his death, a request later ignored by his friends and executors.

In Adams' case, his friends have gone to great lengths to assemble an unfinished novel, other unpublished writings and a number of interviews and features in one volume for the dedicated fan.

The raid on his hard drive is not a fruitful one. The Salmon of Doubt is a great title, even for a man who specialised in great titles, but the novel of the same name within it is less "unfinished" and more "barely started".

Most importantly, it isn't funny. There isn't even a half-laugh in the 80 or so pages, and many of the ideas seem to be wacky for wacky's sake.

It would have been the third in a trilogy of offbeat but only mildly amusing detective novels featuring Dirk Gently, "the holistic detective".

But Adams almost excuses himself from beyond the grave, with one of the essays collected in the book ruminating on PG Wodehouse's Sunset at Blandings, published unfinished because of the author's death.

Adams addicts should enjoy the meanderings

Adams stresses the work is important, without ever singing its praises. It is full of "placeholder" lines, to be replaced with fine-tuned comic brilliance later on, and can only be regarded as a sketch or an outline.

He praises Wodehouse's ability to be a musician with words to comic effect, a characteristic Adams himself shared. In the first three Hitchhiker's books, the funniest ideas are constructed in delicate language but pour out like a torrent.

Among the riot of ideas are a cow genetically modified to recommend cuts to diners, depressed robots, mice experimenting on humans, bands so loud they play on different planets than the audience and the number 42.

But this vaguely-themed collection is only a painful reminder of Adams' genius.

If you are an Adams addict his meanderings on atheism, travel, music, manta rays, the Apple Mac, lemurs and life in California may be the stuff of fascination. But there is no index and there isn't really a lot here for a full-price hardback.

Adams, whose comic canon succeeded on radio, television and nearly film, is one of only a handful of laugh-out-loud authors ever to write in English. But the Salmon of Doubt is no introduction to the uninitiated.

The Salmon of Doubt is available now, published by Macmillan.