I've read the vast majority of his mystery work(all the Fletch, Flynn, Skylar, and Son of Fletch books) and just now finished his latest _Flynn's World_, which came out about 2 years ago, and I was massively disappointed. While the Flynn books tend to serve as a means for McDonald to express his viewpoints, I don't recall any other of his other books being composed of three easily-disposed-of and disconnected plotlines while the author gets to present the most hackneyed strawman example of leftist ideas to poke fun of as well as more or less railing against modernity.
Look, dear reader! all television is bad! see how this morally lazy university faculty member ignores disciplining his obviously unruly children while he plays a vulgar and hyperviolent game on his computer machine! let us lament for the dear, wise old professor whose fellow seat at Harvard will be discontinued after he retires in order for the money to go to Women's Studies or a Gay Student Group! See how the computer machine has turned our culture into mindless robots, worshiping our god of silicon over talking to people! television is still bad! girls on high school wresting teams prove that our immoral culture truly is gone to hell!
but wait, let us interject a subplot about a racist cop, quickly forgotten until the last part of the book when he suddenly shown to be a bomb-making/gun-hoarding neo-nazi!
Blah. One and a half stars. Even the first dull Skylar book was better than this.
Anybody else read this guy's stuff?
― Kingfish MuffMiner 2049er (Kingfish), Friday, 4 March 2005 03:04 (twenty years ago)
Huh. I've read five or six of the Fletch books -- maybe more, I'd read most of them as of a few years ago -- but the Flynn books were always out of print when I looked for them, and I haven't heard of the Skylar books.
Old school Fletch was great -- series detective stuff from before the flesh-eating virus that hit the series detective genre and turned it to crap. I'm really damn disappointed to hear his newer stuff has become so Andy Rooneyish.
― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 4 March 2005 03:13 (twenty years ago)
that's the odd thing. the last mystery book he put out(Skylar In Yankeeland, i think, in 97) was great. I have no idea why this one is so reactionary, other than maybe he finally felt his age after moving to an antebellum estate in tennessee....
― Kingfish MuffMiner 2049er (Kingfish), Friday, 4 March 2005 05:27 (twenty years ago)
Early doors Fletch really really good. Flynn fun.
So yes. Childhood favourites.
― Pete (Pete), Friday, 4 March 2005 12:57 (twenty years ago)
Read only the first Fletch, which I liked quite a lot; the rest of his work is annoyingly absent from libraries. 1st Fletch had something of a satirical/caricatural element; maybe that's what he thought he was doing with his latest.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Friday, 4 March 2005 19:08 (twenty years ago)
I read a lot of Ross McDonald, but no John McDonald (who has like a million books.) I've also read
Fletch.
― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Friday, 4 March 2005 19:09 (twenty years ago)
three years pass...