When your friends and comrades write a book and ask you to have a read, there is always a little hesitation. Someone you have known in one context for over 30 years suddenly strikes out in a new direction – a literary one, writing a first novel. Integrity demands that you give them your honest assessment. That could be jarring! However I am not talking here about Bill Clinton’s collaboration with James Patterson on a Presidential thriller, I don’t know “42” nor do I have much use for him and Hillary.

But my friend and comrade Bill Fletcher Jr. has written a wonderful first mystery thriller entitled “The Man Who Fell From the Sky”. I got about 100 pages in, and I texted Bill that I was putting down an important Marxist political economy tract to devote full energy and attention to his engrossing novel. I know Bill as one of America’s finest political public intellectuals, a comrade who has been in the trenches with me in the labor wars over the last 30 plus years. I have followed his work in Boston and Washington, DC in his capacity as organizer and negotiator and top educator for the AFL-CIO where he pioneered a worker education program that tore into capitalism.

Bill shifts gears to write about Cape Cod and the Cape Verdeans that reside there and in Southeast Massachusetts. He creates an investigative reporter protagonist named David Gomes who writes for “The Cape and Islands Gazette” and its mercurial owner, Jacqueline Reynaud. The book is set in 1970 and Gomes investigates the mysterious sniper murder of a respected Osterville citizen.

I spent part of July, 2018 in the section of the Cape around Falmouth that Bill describes in his novel. I can taste the fried clams and lobster rolls that figure so prominently in encounters between Gomes and his police department buddy, Detective Vincent Amato. A mystery novel that educates is rare but this one gives us insights into the history of Cape Verdeans on Cape Cod and their interactions with whites and African Americans. The plot centers on Cape Verdean servicemen and their struggles in WW II in the Air Force.

There is romance with Gomes’s steady girlfriend Pamela Peters who feels the pull between her career and her desire to be with David. There is the charged relationship with Gomes’s publisher Jacqueline Reynard. I can’t risk giving away any more of the plot or the sensuality of this solid first novel. I told Bill that I thought his work approaches that of the immensely popular Sicilian-Italian crime mystery writer Andrea Camilleri of Inspector Montalbano fame. It educates about politics and is a seductive page turning mystery. Comrades, put aside your weighty tomes of post mid-term election analysis and give ”The Man Who Fell From the Sky” a read.

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