By Joe Maniscalco

Labor writer and activist Bill Fletcher Jr was on a bus in Cuba back in 1999 as part of a special delegation to that country, which also happened to include actor Danny Glover and author Walter Mosley, when he was inspired to share an idea he had percolating in his head for a new murder mystery.

“I was talking to Danny, and I told him my idea,” Fletcher tells Work-Bites. “He said, ‘You should write up a treatment for a screenplay and send it to me.’ Now, the reality is I had no idea what a treatment was — none.”

Fletcher soon learned how to write a treatment and later wrote the whole screenplay. By 2008, that screenplay had evolved into the manuscript for his first published work of fiction: “The Man Who Fell From The Sky” from Hard Ball Press. It was an opportunity for the former shipyard welder to examine issues of justice, revenge, and race in America — but in a totally different way.

“That’s why fiction became such a great vehicle,” Fletcher says. “In the United States, we often look at race in terms of a black/white issue. Maybe we might look at what’s happened to Native-Americans, Asians or Latinos — but it’s very often black/white. I wanted to look at a population who are of African descent who have had a very complex relationship to race in the United States. And I wanted to use that as a way of conveying to the reader that race is not linear; it’s not just a dichotomy. In reality it’s a method of social control — and it’s a method of social control that mutates.”

Fletcher is back with a new novel from Hard Ball Press called, “The Man Who Changed Colors,” which follows the further adventures of investigative reporter David Gomes as he doggedly tries to untangle the suspicious death of a Massachusetts dockworker. The virtual book launch for “The Man Who Changed Colors” is set for April 20, at 7 p.m.

Making the leap from the world of non-fiction to fiction has been rough on the influential labor activist and commentator.

“There're some people that when they hear my name, they're expecting something about the Left, about strategy, about Labor, about international affairs — whatever,” he explains. “They're not expecting fiction and they don't know what to do with it. This is a challenge.”

Many notable figures have experienced similar challenges from readers intent on  keeping authors in boxes — even those they celebrate and admire, like Fletcher.

“I don't know how we break through because this is not a new problem,” he says. “I mean, for example, I didn't know for the longest time that W. E. B. Du Bois had written a work of fiction. I knew that he was a poet. But when people think about Du Bois they don't normally think about his work of fiction, unless you’re really into Du Bois. And I don't think that's because of bad fiction or bad poetry. I think that there is a way this pigeonholing happens — and I think it's really something that needs to be taken up more broadly because it's very frustrating as a writer.”

Fletcher’s fictional hero could have been a hardboiled private detective, but he says it was important to make David Gomes an investigative journalist for a couple of key reasons —  one being to make him more relatable and real to readers.

“I wanted him to be someone who is confronted with challenges that regular people could actually envision that they themselves might find themselves in,” Fletcher says. “Just imagine that you found out that the Gambino Crime Family had put a hit out on you, what would you do? Your reactions would be very different than if you were Jim Rockford or Easy Rawlins. That’s what I wanted to convey. You’ve got this character who's at a small newspaper in a small town, beautiful town, but a small town in Massachusetts — he is not going to respond to events the way that a private detective would. I thought that would make him more believable.”

Fletcher, who once contemplated a journalism career himself, says he also wanted to use Gomes as a way of promoting journalism and the “role of the journalist” today.

“I wanted to have someone that could inquire, who really wanted to dig into the truth,” he says. “Not just because he was being paid to do so — but because he was driven to dig into the truth.”