His other books include four novels starring Francis Xavier Flynn, a music-loving Boston cop introduced in “Confess, Fletch” and a collection of his writing for The Globe, first published in 1985 and to be reissued in November by Seven Stories Press as “Souvenirs of a Blown World.”Ī novel of which Mr. Mcdonald is survived by a sister, two sons, three stepsons and grandchildren.

Another non-Fletch novel, “The Brave,” (Barricade Books, 1991), about a young man who takes part in a snuff film to help his destitute family, was filmed in 1997 with Johnny Depp.īesides his wife, the former Cheryle Higgins, whom he married in 2001, Mr. The book, whose subject matter distressed many critics, was filmed in 1972, starring Robert Powell and Barry Morse. It told the story of a college student who stands coolly by as his roommate commits suicide. Mcdonald’s first novel, “Running Scared” (Obolensky), appeared in 1964. He moved to Tennessee in the mid-1980s, and after settling in Pulaski, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, he was active in anti-Klan work. Mcdonald spent seven years on the staff of The Globe, where he wrote about culture. Mcdonald’s other awards, as The Globe reported on Thursday, was his personal favorite, “Best Foreign Author Not Yet Dead,” from the Moscow Literary Review in 1992. 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.