Two “Fletch” and “Confess, Fletch” (Avon, 1976) won Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. Mcdonald’s manager, David List, said Thursday. The Fletch novels have sold tens of millions of copies, Mr. He was, in short, the perfect hero for the countercultural ’70s, and the public ate him up. He was a cad, a deadbeat (unpaid alimony), an opportunist and a sometime accumulator of vast ill-gotten wealth. He was a slob (at least early on), whose sartorial taste ran to T-shirts and jeans. A Southern California newspaperman turned beach bum, he flouted authority wherever he found it. Irwin Maurice Fletcher was young, cocky and smart but no white knight. (The journalists, politicians, Ivy League types and drug dealers who populate Fletch’s world are all equally reprehensible.) The series began in 1974 with “Fletch,” published by Bobbs-Merrill. The Fletch novels, nine in all, were praised by critics for their sharp, sardonic dialogue and mordant social commentary. Mcdonald was considered a master of the comic-mystery genre.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Cheryle Mcdonald.Ī former reporter and editor for The Boston Globe, Mr. Fletcher, breezily known as Fletch, have sold millions of copies and inspired two Hollywood films, died on Sunday at his home in Pulaski, Tenn. Gregory Mcdonald, an Edgar Award-winning crime writer whose acidly funny novels starring the subversive sleuth I.

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