Paul Oldham reviewed Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald
This hasn't aged well
1 star
I vaguely remember this as being a watchable movie starring Chevy Chase as Fletch. This is the book on which the film was based and I didn't finish it. I had two problems with it. Firstly it was dialogue rich without occasional reminders of which character was speaking but the main problems was that the author makes no attempt to give you any idea what Fletch is thinking and you're left with a thin character and, and this is important, an amoral one.
Fletch is a reporter posing as a drug addict for a story he's researching and he's sleeping with a young woman who really is a junkie and is making money by doing tricks ... and she's 15. At no point is there any suggestion that Fletch feels any need to do anything to resolve this: it's just colour.
The book was written in 1974 and it's out of print. I can't help wondering if the moral stance of the lead character is part of that.