Fletch

Fletch is a mystery novel by the American writer Gregory Mcdonald, published in 1974. It is the first of the books about Irwin Maurice Fletcher.

Fletcher is a journalist and a former Marine, camping on a beach undercover while he works on an exposé of the drug trade there and tries to find out where one dealer's apparently endless supply comes from. His research is interrupted by Alan Stanwyck, a millionaire businessman in the airline industry, who takes him for a vagrant and asks him to kill him. Stanwyck says he is dying of bone cancer and that his life insurance will not pay out if he kills himself.

Fletch accepts a thousand dollars in cash to listen, negotiates the fee up to fifty thousand to find out how serious the man is, and discovers that he is entirely serious. He starts checking Stanwyck's story with the people who know him, while two lawyers pursue him for alimony for each of his ex-wives, and what he learns does not match what he was told.