FLETCH and FLYNN by Gregory McDonald, 5 stars
Written by Rich Rogers
A few months back, I said my favorite mystery comedies were by Gregory McDonald, so I decided it was time to introduce you to my two favorite McDonald characters. McDonald always said he was never sure if he was writing mysteries that were comedies, or comedies that were mysteries. Either way, Fletch and Flynn were both excellent additions to the world of mystery novels.
Fletch is an investigative reporter who hates shoes, the office, and his editor, who’s sleeping with the publisher. At the moment he’s hot on two different stories. First, he’s investigating drug-trafficking on a beach on Southern California. In the course of that story, he’s approached by multimillionaire Alan Stanwyck, offering to pay him $1,000 just for listening to a proposal. The proposal? He wants Fletch to murder him.
As Fletch follows the leads for both, things get very interesting, and funny. I must say if you’ve seen the movie, this is definitely different. The movie tied the two stories together. In the book they’re never linked.
McDonald borrows a lot from Dashiell Hammett’s tight style, especially when it comes to dialogue–more of the Nick and Nora Charles type from “The Thin Man” rather than the “Maltese Falcon’s” Sam Spade. Some chapters are entirely dialogue. It’s truly amazing what you can do just through dialogue. And it’s funny. Very funny. I first read these books when I was a junior in high school and laughed all the way through them. They’ve stayed funny through the years. Although not all the Fletch titles are equal, as with most series. The first three in the series were great–Fletch, Confess Fletch, and Fletch’s Fortune. The first two novels are the only two mystery novels where a novel and its sequel have won back to back Edgar Awards for best mystery. Things got bad for a while after that, “Fletch and the Widow Bradley” and “Fletch and the Man Who” are downright unreadable. He started redeeming himself later with “Carioca Fletch”, “Fletch Won” and then “Fletch Too”, going back to Fletch’s early days as a journalist. And the “Son of Fletch” titles are great, up there with his best.
In “Confess”, Fletch, our hero meets an equally unconventional inspector for the Boston Police Department, Francis Xavier Flynn. Flynn was such an interesting character that McDonald spun him off into his own series of four novels. I loved them all. I found the fourth to be less of a mystery as much as a commentary on the world of academia. In this one the mystery seems secondary. But that doesn’t weaken it in anyway.
In Flynn we find the only inspector in the Boston Police Department. And there’s a reason for that. F. X. Flynn is really an undercover agent for an unnamed government agency, using this job as a cover.
But Flynn is not your typical James Bond, Matt Helm, or Travis McGee type of spy or sleuth. He’s a family man, happily married with four children, including a set of twins he sometimes uses in his police work. Yes, he actually does some police work, while saving the world from the bad guys people don’t want to know about.
And the trademark McDonald humor is abundant in the Flynn novels as well.
These books are all available in paperback as well as electronic formats. Compared to these Lisa Lutz’s Spellman mysteries are also rans.
Rich welcomes comments and questions from readers. You can reach him at [email protected]
