The first two Hitchhikers’ books were at the tail end of a long rewrite process that started with the radio scripts; the first Dirk Gently book took large chunks of the plot from earlier scripts Adams had written. His best novels are the cases where even the first draft of the novel was a later draft of some earlier work.

The book of original radio scripts described Adams working on the script up to the final available minute, and typing on carbons—which required retyping entire pages after errors. This built-in rewrite process helped make the original radio material as good as it was (even if it did run up against deadline).

His later works suffered from two related problems: first, as much as he loved computers, writing in a word processor eliminated the need for retyping drafts, and eliminating technologically-required rewrites generally reduced the amount of rewriting and polishing that the books saw.

Second, his procrastination meant that the closing portions of the books were often written under a great deal of editorial pressure. Long Dark Tea-Time Of the Soul in particular suffers from this; if you carefully reread the final thirty pages or so, all the loose ends get tied up, but many of the resolutions are rather perfunctory. It’s clear that Adams simply hit a point where he was under orders to finish the manuscript as soon as was humanly possible, and that the book as a whole suffers because the latter bits did not have the opportunity to be rewritten and reworked.

It is a tragedy that he is no longer with us.

It’s brillig!

Why not “novelist”?

And I don’t follow your point about ideas vs writing – you mean his prose isn’t flashy? It seems light and effective to me. Clearly he can’t sustain interest when he runs out of ideas, but can any novelist?