Rediscovering Fletch: The Book Behind the Movie

The novel 'Fletch' is a bit more serious than the movie, but just as good. Readers also get to learn more about Irwin R. Fletcher.

Image Credit: Paramount Pictures

Confession: I sometimes find myself getting exhausted in this Age of Information.

The 24-7 news cycles. The apocalyptic narratives. The doom scrolling. The economic insanity. The (dare I say it?) decadent culture.

So instead of making it miserable, I’ve been getting offline and reading a bit more. Along with economics, history, and philosophy, I’ve even been mixing in some light-hearted fiction, one of my true pleasures.

Readers of this Substack might know that I’m a big fan of the movie Fletch. Even the reboot with Jon Hamm was surprisingly good.

But until 2025 I had never read the books written by Gregory Mcdonald (1937-2008). So I picked up the first book in the series and gave it a read. It was fantastic.

Mcdonald started his writing career as a reporter for the Boston Globe. He clearly understood the value of lean copy and sharp dialogue. In fact, I can’t think of a single book I’ve read that is driven by dialogue so effectively. Maybe Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne.

Anyway, Fletch the book is just as funny as Fletch the movie, though it is a bit darker and more serious (and less politically correct) at times. Mcdonald wrote the book in the early 1970s, when the toll of drug use was becoming undeniable.

We see this through a 15-year-old junkie named Bobbi.

Early in the book, Fletch, who is a newspaper reporter, makes a joke to his editor about sleeping with a 15-year-old girl. Later we learn Fletch was not just making a crass joke. He was sleeping with a 15-year-old girl—but not in the way he implied.

Bobbi is a wrecked kid who lives on the beach. She has no life. No home. No future. And she knows it. We see that Fletch is using Bobbi to get information about drugs on the beach, but we also see he cares about her—not in a sexual way but out of compassion.

One night he climbs in bed to sleep beside her (something writers would struggle to get past a publisher today, I suspect). And while lying beside one another, Fletch and Bobbi talk.

She said, “Are you really twenty-six?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“I’ll never be twenty-six, will I?”

“I guess not.”

“How do I feel about that?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

She said, “Neither do I.”

That’s how the chapter ends. Seven chapters later, after several days of pursuing his story, Fletch is back on the beach. He wakes to find Bobbi dead in the sleeping bag next to him.

As you can see, the novel is a bit more serious than the movie. We also get to learn a bit more about Irwin R. Fletcher. Here are a few things.