Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald (Gollancz, 1976): the Original Novel, Basis for the 1985 Movie

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Next in this run of posts on books which begat perhaps more famous films, we move from an obscure '60s crime novel – in a Gollancz first edition – and its '70s movie adaptation to a rather less obscure '70s crime novel – also in a Gollancz first edition – and its '80s movie adaptation:

First published in hardback in the UK by Gollancz in 1976 – two years after the US Bobbs-Merrill edition – Fletch was American journalist-turned-author Gregory Mcdonald's second novel, following 1964's Running Scared. It was also the first in what would become an eleven-book mystery series, one which would hop back and forth across the life of both its title character, investigative reporter I. M. Fletcher, and latterly his son, and would also spin off another four-book series featuring police inspector Flynn. But more pertinently from the perspective of this 'ere series of posts, in 1985 Fletch was turned into a film, starring Chevy Chase as the eponymous lead.

Now, let me just state for the record here that I'm a huge fan of Michael Ritchie's movie (which was scripted by Andrew Bergman, who also wrote Blazing Saddles). I rarely miss an opportunity to respond to a "thank you" or, even better, a "muchas gracias" with "Tierra del Fuego", or reply to enquiries as to what I do for a living with "I'm a shepherd". But as eminently quotable and gloriously silly as Fletch the movie is – and even though it was my gateway to Mcdonald's series (which, courtesy of Beckenham Library, I made my way through during the 1980s, although I don't believe I ever read the "son of Fletch" books) – the original novel still, I think, stands as the superior work.

A big part of the reason for that is Mcdonald's narrative approach. Fletch – all the Fletch novels, in fact – is very dialogue-heavy, with little in the way of description. Chapters typically begin with a conversation and progress from there, Mcdonald filling in the gaps where necessary. But where, say, George V. Higgins's similarly dialogue-heavy prose, with its long speeches posing as conversations, can become wearying (or at least, can for me), Mcdonald keeps it light and snappy, the back-and-forth banter between Fletch and the various players a joy to read.

Of course, Chevy Chase brought his own unique voice to Fletch – the character and film – dropping in ad-libs and generally arsing about. Even here, though, many of his quips and one-liners have their basis in the book – Fletch introducing himself to someone as "John Zalumarinero", or engaging with a police chief thus:

"What's your name?"

"Fletch."

"What's your full name?"

"Fletch Fletch Fletch."

Alone in the chief's bare, utilitarian office, they sat on either side of a gray aluminum desk.

"By any chance, could Fletch be short for Fletcher?"

"It could be."

"Is Fletcher your first name or your last?"

"My first name."

"What's your last name?"

"Smith."

"Fletcher Smith," the Chief said. "Seems I've heard that name somewhere before."

"Fletcher Smith?"

"No. Just Smith. Where do you live, Smith?"

"I forget the address. Where your goons picked me up this morning."

"You live there?"

"Weekends I spend in Hawaii."

"Do you live alone?"

"Except for a pet roach."

"And what do you do for a living, Mr. Smith?"

"I"m a shoeshine boy."

Meanwhile the screenplay progresses along essentially the same lines as the book – Fletch is hired by wealthy businessman Alan Stanwyk to murder Stanwyk, a proposition which eventually becomes entwined with Fletch's investigation into the LA beach drugs scene – which is more than can be said for the 1989 sequel to the movie, Fletch Lives, again directed by Ritchie, but bearing little relation to Mcdonald's novels. Mind you, Fletch Lives, while nowhere near as good as the first film – and certainly not the equal of the books – has its own share of daffy dialogue. ("Take your pants off." "I don't even know your name." "Bend over." "Ben? Nice to meet you, Victor Hugo.")

The Gollancz edition of Fletch has become fairly uncommon in first: AbeBooks has just two copies listed at present, one of them ex-library (ignore the listings for Confess, Fletch, the first sequel, which has been mistakenly listed as being published in 1976 by a few sellers; it was actually published by Gollancz in 1977) – rather less than the Bobbs-Merrill first, of which there are over twenty copies currently available.

I'm planning on returning to Mcdonald and his Fletch series down the line – when I'll probably get into what a minefield collecting the novels in Gollancz first editions is – but next in this series of posts: a terrific 1972 thriller in the Geoffrey Household mould, one which begat an incredibly successful film franchise, and whose (anti-)hero would wind up as an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary...

Shelf Porn!

It's a new day
It's a new dawn
It's the same old Tories
So let's have some shelf porn!

Yes, we may be lumbered with a Conservative (and Liberal Democrat, although that's essentially the same thing these days) government, but we'll always have Paris. I mean we'll always have books. Not Paris. Paris is lovely, but it's irrelevant. I mean irrelevant to this post. Not irrelevant in a wider sense. Although it is to the Tories. But anyway.

Thus far, we've had Richard Stark/Donald Westlake Shelf Porn and Patricia Highsmith Shelf Porn. Now I'd like to take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Lon-- no, hang on, I'd like to take you by the hand and guide you around the rest of my bookshelves. Let's take a look, shall we?









This is the shelf underneath my Highsmith and Stark (and Kingsley Amis) books. From left to right we have two big Love & Rockets hardbacks (Palomar and Locas, the first of which I bought in the famed Lambiek comic shop in Amsterdam I think); then some Joe Sacco graphic novels (Safe Area Gorazde among them); a couple of Michael Rabagliati Paul graphic novels; epic alt-comix anthology Kramers Ergot volumes 4 to 6; some DC Comics crossover Crisis collections (including the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths, a comic I absolutely loved when I was younger); a few Daniel Clowes books; and various Marvel hardcovers, including X-Men: Messiah Complex, which is probably the best post-Morrison X-Men story. And then at the back a few hardback novels (including Stephen King's The Stand) and some political tomes, Alan Clark's brilliant Diaries among them (there are more political memoirs and the like behind the books on the top shelf).

Three views of the shelf above my record collection. Various things here, including, from left to right, J. G. Ballard's Running Wild (illustrated by Janet Woolley); first editions of Gregory Mcdonald's first three Fletch novels; assorted crime and SF novels, including a first edition of Poul Anderson's Brain Wave; my Gavin Lyall collection; a first of Peter O'Donnell's debut Modesty Blaise novel; the Kinglsey Amis-written James Bond Dossier and Book of Bond; Book Club editions of Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love and Dr. No; Pan paperback editions of Bond novels (lots of first paperback editions there); and Richard Stark paperback editions.

Phew. To be continued...

Stark and Westlake Shelf Porn

I like the idea of shelf porn. I'm actually surprised there isn't a blog devoted to it (maybe I should start one...). It's a simple idea that's spread across the internet the last year or two: basically it's photos of people's bookshelves, usually comics- or graphic novels-based, a kind of 'gaze in awe at all my luverly books' thing. So I thought I'd post some of my own shelf porn, starting, naturally enough, with my Donald Westlake/Richard Stark collection:











Niiiice. Lots of Allison & Busby editions of the Parker novels there, plus Coronet paperbacks on top, some Random House (Plunder Squad and Butcher's Moon)/Mysterious Press/Robert Hale editions on the near side, and a Hodder & Stoughton edition of the first Grofield novel, The Damsel, on the end there. (Amusingly, these days, if you google something like 'Richard Stark The Damsel' or 'Richard Stark Plunder Squad', Existential Ennui pops up in the top ten hits.)











And a slightly wider view, with the first Modesty Blaise novel and the first three Fletch novels on the near end, Kingsley Amis firsts down the other end, and assorted graphic novels underneath.

Again: niiiiiiice.

To be continued...

New(ish) Acquisitions

Well in all the excitement over birthdays and new Allison & Busby Parker novels and Outfit DVDs and the like, I plum forgot to mention a couple of new acquisitions. Namely, this:













a 1978 first UK edition of the third Fletch novel, Fletch's Fortune; and this:













a 1961 first paperback edition of the sixth Bond novel, Goldfinger. I do love these old Pan paperbacks. I've got first Pan editions now of this, Dr. No and From Russia, with Love, plus first re-set editions of Casino Royale and Moonraker, and early editions of Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever too. That last one is next on my list to read, although I've just started Patricia Highsmith's The Blunderer, and also the fourth Parker novel, The Mourner, so I dunno when I'll get to it. Er, and I've started reading Stuart Maconie's Adventures on the High Teas as well. Um, and a graphic novel, Jamie Delano and Jock's Hellblazer: Pandemonium. Uh, and I'm dipping into Eddie Campbell's great big Alec collection, which was another birthday present, and contains a new story. Gah. Too. Many. Books!

Latest Arrivals

Rather excitingly, there were two – count 'em, two – packages waiting for me at home yesterday:













That's a first UK edition of Fletch and a first UK edition of Confess, Fletch, the sequel. (And that's my hand holding both.) Except, on closer inspection, Confess, Fletch turns out to be a book club edition. Gah! What was I saying about the internet being trustworthy? Ah well, never mind. It was only a quid, and aside from the "BCA" logo on the case spine (but not on the jacket) and the lack of a price on the front flap, you wouldn't know the difference. It must've been a book club run-on from the first edition, as the inside bears the Gollancz logo and no mention of it being a book club edition. It'll do me. (Unless I change my mind and get another copy... there seem to be a few cheap ones on AbeBooks... no... must resist... that way lies MADNESS.)

As for Fletch, that's definitely a first edition, but it's ex-library. However it's in nice condition, no pages removed, the only evidence of it being ex-library a small "Cumbria County Library" stamp on the copyright page (and it's price-clipped of course). So I'm very pleased with that one. I started reading it last night; I read most of the Fletch novels years ago (borrowed from the library, natch, so those yellow Gollancz covers are very familiar), and re-reading it now it surprised me how close it is initially to the Chevy Chase movie, Fletch coming across in the book as quite the wise-ass. And it is as description-light/dialogue-dense as I remembered.

In other book news, I've got my eye on eBay on a 1949 Penguin edition of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, and elsewhere on the web on a 1944 British Publishers Guild edition of the same novel. I'm also toying with getting a first Pan edition of From Russia with Love, and keeping my eye out for old editions of Richard Stark's The Hunter (or Point Blank, as it was first published in the UK to tie in with the Lee Marvin film) and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (now made into a film by Michael Winterbottom, of 24 Hour Party People fame). And I'd quite like to get my hands on a copy of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. It piqued my curiosity when I was working on a book about cult books recently.

On the reading front, I polished off Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island in short order. Really enjoyed it, but without spoiling it, it does leave you with a slight feeling of what I like to call Boxing Helena Syndrome. If you know that film, you'll have an inkling of what I'm on about (although Shutter Island is nowhere near the level of utter shitness that Boxing Helena resides on). Currently I'm reading Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, which, like many of her books, I initially struggled to get into, but now it's starting to grip. And I've begun another Bond, Moonraker this time, which starts with a great description of Bond's day-to-day office life when he's not on assignment (according to the novel, he only has a couple of assignments a year).

Stray Thoughts

I think I've got another longish post brewing, but I haven't had time to do owt about it (and having now written this, I'll probably end up forgetting what it was gonna be about in the first place), so in the meantime, here's what's rattling round my mind.

The Polish DVD of Ripley Under Ground turned up. Haven't had a chance to watch all of it, but I checked the first few minutes, and it's not in Polish, and you can turn off the Polish subtitles. Huzzah. From the first couple of minutes, it looks like Tom Ripley has been transposed to London, living in a shabby flat and performing at a theatre. Interesting, and that does sort of make sense considering what comes later (in the book that is), and also if the filmmakers wanted this to be a standalone movie, which I think they did. More once I've watched all of it.

I've just ordered a copy of Peter O'Donnell's debut Modesty Blaise novel, first edition, for a very low price, considering it can go for anything up to £100 or so. I launched Titan Books' series of reprints of the Modesty newspaper strip in 2004, but although I liked the idea of the characters, the strip never really grabbed me, probably because when you work on something it's hard to step away and appreciate it without recalling the trials and tribulations that went into putting it together (and oh the trials and tribulations at Titan...). I've got enough distance now, and many people – including, I seem to recall, Peter himself – reckon the novels are a better read than the comic strips, so I'll give it a go.

(I still fondly recall spending an afternoon with Peter at his home in Brighton, interviewing him for the bonus features in the first few volumes of the reprints. A lovely man.)

I'm also pondering ordering the first couple of Gregory Mcdonald's Fletch novels. I read most of the series years ago and absolutely loved them, but I've been reading Dennis Lehane's excellent Shutter Island this week, and Lehane's way of writing long stretches of dialogue reminded me of Mcdonald; the Fletch novels are almost like screenplays, with very little description. It's all in the dialogue, and brilliant dialogue at that. So I think I'll get hold of Fletch and Confess, Fletch and revisit them.

And that's yer lot fer now.