The novel is set in the 7 days between his acceptance of the job and the day he is supposed to commit the crime and flee to Rio. Fletch senses that something is not quite right, not least because Stanwyck appears to be the picture of good health, so he accepts the offer but then starts to dig around the man’s life. He is undercover, investigating drug dealing on the beach – the distributor is ‘Fat Sam’, who never leaves his shack on the beach, so how does he get his supplies? While there, Fletch is accosted by Alan Stanwyck, a millionaire industrialist who runs an aerospace company and who has a strange proposition – he is dying of cancer and wants Fletch to kill him and make it look like a robbery so his wife and daughter will be able to collect the insurance. He has two ex-wives, seems to have collected a lot of disapproval for his stories and when we first meet him he looks like any other bum, lolling around on a California beach with other dropouts looking for their next drug fix. Here he is 29, an investigative journalist and Vietnam veteran (the war of course was still dragging on when the book first came out) and a recipient of the Bronze Star, which in typical fashion he has refused to go and officially accept. The sequence of novels would eventually get a bit convoluted as Mcdonald progressed, moving backwards and forwards to provide a fascinating portrait of his protagonist at different points in his life. Which is to say, they’re pretty damn good.
It won an Edgar in 1975 as did its sequel, Confess, Fletch (1976), the first and only such win for consecutive books in a series in the history of the Awards of the Mystery Writers of America. Eventually the original series would run to nine novels, published between 19, two belated sequels in the following decade and four spin-offs.
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