Son of Fletch

Plot
It was a dark and stormy night...

In eleven novels in the series, one of them was bound to start off like this, in a sense. Like most in the Fletch series, the story is off like a shot from the beginning, but then just a tad into the first act there's another huge plot point (suggested by the title of the book) or known by the close reader who remembers Crystal Faoni who was a major (large?) character from Fletch's Fortune.

I don't know that I believed the convicts just taking Fletch's word for where to hide out at the time, in part because the character development to make it plausible didn't come until later. There was also a plot point involving the sheriff that I saw coming from a mile away that could/should have been much more subtle for a bigger surprise when it was revealed.

My biggest problem was that after some great build up I was expecting something really big or interesting from either Fletch or his son to close out the whole story. Sadly the end of the plot devolved in too quick and short a manner for a really satisfying pay off.

Of all of the Fletch books, so far this one seems to be the biggest influencer for the creation of portions of the movie Fletch Lives, which was otherwise made out of whole cloth based on the character. In some sense Cleavon Little's character "Calculus Entropy" replaced Fletch's son and big parts of the plot were heavily rewritten purely for entertainment's sake.

Of all of the books which mention the seemingly ever-present Edward Arthur Tharp, Jr., this one seems to have more detail about it, particularly as in this story the book has finally been finished and it becomes a method by which Fletch and his son seem to probe each other about it. Oddly there was no mention or parallel between Fletch's own mother as a writer and his having become a writer.

Character
Fletch's girlfriend in this piece serves as pure plot and didn't feel as multi-dimensional as she should have been given her role in the piece. She does serve well as the "better angel" as well as the gut reaction most readers will also be feeling through the story. But as always, one must just "trust" Fletch and his plan of where he's going, even if he's not sure himself.

Fletch himself seems to be much the same as we remember him, though I really wonder how and why he seems to have settled down into small town Tennessee life. Descriptions in the book make it sound like he's still a man of the world, but somehow interesting people come to him instead of him going to see them. None of this really fits into the bigger character to me, but the story continues as if it doesn't matter anyway.

Fletch's son plays things very close to the vest, so his motivations and character aren't really developed until much later in the piece, but in some sense he's at least differentiated well enough from Fletch to be his "own man" here.

I liked that even the racists here were given some well done characterization so that despite their beliefs that one could actually feel bad for them in some sense. I will say it was relatively interesting to read in the timeperiod of the 2016 presidential election.

Summary
Overall this was a middle-of-the-road Fletch installment. (But still ranks relatively high on the mystery/suspense/detective genres). I suspect that it would have been more interesting to Fletch fans who hadn't had an installment in a few years based on the time it was released. For a potential reboot of the series, or for kicking off a new series, it wasn't a bad effort.

Review originally published at BoffoSocko.com

The book that started it all!

I'd originally read this sometime around 1988 after seeing the Warner Bros. feature film of the same name. It's not quite as over-the-top as the comedy of the film and the humor is a little sharper and wrier.

For the most part, the plotline of the text is nearly identical to that of the film with a few exceptions mostly relating to names of characters and casting (warning: spoilers follow):

The Collins family has been renamed Boyd, likely so as not to run afoul of the name of author Joan Collins.
Fletch's editors Clara and Frank are concatenated into the character of just Frank.
Fletch's beach girlfriend Bobbi doesn't exist in the film, likely to focus more on Joan.
Montgomery is a younger high-school aged student with more social ties than the Gummy of the film.
Stanwyk is not involved in the drug trade and his death at the hands of the Chief of Police is motivated by a different bit of plot. He also has an additional local paramour. His character and motivations are much better delineated in the book and several characters backing this up were missing from the film.
Much of the shennanigans of the film was added there and didn't exist in the book, though almost all of the motivating comedy and sense of humor is surely there.
Large chunks of dialogue from the film are drawn almost directly from the book.
The film is obviously a bit more cinematic and kinetic with Fletch doing much more movement, travel, and even chase scenes to make things in the film move along, while the book is a bit more balanced and even realistic.
Certainly there are many other differences, but this covers the broadest spectrum.

In this motivating text for the remainder of the series, Fletch is drawn as a very clear-cut and incredibly interesting character with a fantastic sense of morality and humor. Of the parts of the series I've read thus far, this is definitely one of my favorites, second only perhaps to Confess, Fletch.

Here the cat-and-mouse-game between Fletch and Joan is better delineated and the relationship between Fletch and Stanwyk's father is quirkier and more interesting.

If you enjoyed the movie (and even if you didn't), you're sure to appreciate this as fiction, particularly with Mcdonald's ability to paint a picture with words and write story through character.

A brief note on the physical text

This is assuredly an optical character recognition scanned version of the original text. There are a dozen or so obvious typos that didn't get fixed. There are more than several places where a temporal change in the plot occurs, but the additional line returns that were originally included to indicate the break are now missing. This can make reading portion a bit annoying. The quality control of the typesetting of the e-book text could certainly have been much better.