Note too that Gregory McDonald, a career journalist himself, pares his writing down to the bare minimum, with short, staccato sentences and snappy dialogue runs that keep the reader zipping through the short chapters. “I mean, I don’t even have a tape recorder on this phone.”
“You’re supposed to call Emergency with a murder.” Fletch, who should be feeling nervous as a murder suspect, shows a likeable grace and humor under pressure: Their exchange offers an excellent example of why McDonald’s writing is so consistently enjoyable. The journalist, incidentally, uses the precinct’s business number to report the murder, much to the desk sergeant’s irritation. The victim was a stewardess from the airline Fletch had used and the murder weapon turns out to be a whiskey bottle, one that sports Fletch’s fingerprints due to a post-discovery drink as he waited for the police.
On Page One, Fletch arrives in Boston from Italy and finds the body of an attractive but dead young woman in the apartment he has been loaned for his visit. The author wastes no time in holding his protagonist’s feet to the fire. In many ways, Confess, Fletch improves on the eponymous first book: the crime story is twistier, the plot doesn’t signal its destination before arriving, and McDonald provides two memorably engaging supporting characters for his quick-witted antihero to joust with. To start off the New Year, I wanted to revisit a book I had read and greatly enjoyed just a short while ago: Confess, Fletch, Gregory McDonald’s second entry in his amusing and energetic series featuring journalist Irwin Maurice Fletcher.
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