Final episode of Hitch Hiker Guide found in author's files

THE unfinished final novel of Douglas Adams, the cult science-fiction author, has been recovered from his computer and will be published on the first anniversary of his death next May.

A Salmon of Doubt will be the sixth and final episode in the Hitch Hiker series and, though it will be edited, it will remain "unfinished".

The work was found by his widow, Jane Belson, and his personal assistant, Sophie Astin. Adams, who died suddenly of a heart attack at 49, suffered from writer's block and is believed to have been working on the book for 11 years.

Ed Victor, his agent, said: "We have pored over Douglas's hard drive. There were so many different versions of the novel. He would take it and then revise it repeatedly so there were many files.

He added: "As soon as he wrote anything he would say, 'Oh God, that's terrible'. He was a very, very self-critical author."

A Salmon of Doubt will be published in a volume of the author's final writing, much of it unseen. The compendium includes magazine and newspaper articles, lectures, writings from his website and his work with BBC Radio 4. It will also include the screenplay of The Hitch Hiker'sGuide to the Galaxy.

Mr Victor said: "We have transcripts of about five general lectures he gave. Douglas made his living as a lecturer for the past 10 years because he was so stuck on his novel. He also wrote sleeve notes for the Brandenburg Concertos. Penguin issued a series of classical CDs and Douglas was a Bach fanatic so he wrote the sleeve notes."

He added: "There is also a hilarious essay called My Nose, which he wrote for GQ magazine in 1991. There are pieces that he wrote for the website, for example one about two dogs called Maggie and Trudy who kept him company from Santa Fe into Mexico when he wrote a script for The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, and there is also a substantial amount of email correspondence he had with his family and friends."

His wife, a lawyer, and his daughter Polly, returned to London two weeks ago. The house where the family lived in Santa Barbara, California, has been put up for sale.

Ms Belson has been one of a number of editors working on her husband's work. The others include Peter Guzzardi, who was his American editor for many years, Mr Victor and Miss Astin.

Miss Astin said: "It is nice to be reading his work but it is tinged with great sadness. There is 20 years of work on the computer and I am pulling together all sorts of things. It will be a surprise but it will make people laugh, I hope."

Adams shot to fame after the book of his BBC radio series The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in 1979. It went straight to Number One on the British bestseller's list and sold more than 14 million copies.

His subsequent novels included the best-selling titles The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, The Universe and Everything (1982), So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992).

Miss Astin, who worked for Adams for five years before his death, said the final book was intended to be both a recognition of his contribution to literature and a conclusion of his work. Mr Victor said: "It is a last will and testament of Adams in his writing."

I love Pratchett's works a thousand times more; by volume and content he is much the better author. But I have, or had, a special place in my heart for Doug Adams. Sadly, he was a very one trick pony. He did that trick without question fantastickly, but one day he did something that p*ssed me off so greatly that I could never forgive him.

I saw him growing as an author. I loved the first few books without exception, and finally, on the rebuilt earth, he gave poor, bedraggled Arthur Dent a life. That poor bugger got his lady love, on the rebuilt earth, and the life that the character deserved after all the travels and pain. And then, Adams stole her, and destroyed Arthur's life and killed every character I ever cared about, apparently completely and forever, along with the rebuilt Earth and every earth like it. The wretched bastard killed my friends.

Now this may be because he was tired of the character, or because he had this dreaded writers block. But I took it no kinder than Conan Doyle's readers did when he snuffed the Great Detective. At a certain point, characters stop belonging to the author and start belonging to the readers. If Dickens had carved up Little Nell with a rusty bread knife, people would have spit on him. I feel much the same way about Douglas Adams. (And to a lesser extent about Heinlein, who wrote incredible stuff in his younger, idealistic days, and later turned into a pagan, God-hating, crazed sex freak. My second great disappointment is "The Number of the Beast", in which RAH starts out like his classic self with a grand, paranoid, alien-takeover book, skews through some Sliders-esk parallel worlds, and nose-dives into a bit of lame fanfic-level tripe.)

Anyway, I miss Douglas Adams. The younger one. Before he cut my heart out with a rusty bread knife.

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