The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is a 1988 humorous fantasy detective novel by Douglas Adams and the second book featuring the private detective Dirk Gently, after Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Adams intended to follow it with a third Dirk Gently novel, The Salmon of Doubt, but died before completing it; an unfinished draft appears in the posthumously published collection of the same name. The book has been adapted for radio, and several of its plot lines appear in a 2010 television series, which is unusual for a novel with this kind of internal logic.

The title is a phrase that appeared in Adams's earlier novel Life, the Universe and Everything, where it is used to describe a kind of emotional low. The plot connects the detective's work to Norse mythology, which gives the book its two registers: an office-based investigation and a divine dispute, with the humour coming from the collision rather than from either element separately. The Norse material is not a background detail: the case turns on a dispute among gods, and the detective's holistic method is a running joke about the impossibility of coincidence.