Trouble in the Labor Camp

I am very pleased to announce that a novella of mine entitled Trouble in the Labor Camp has been published as an e-book. The producer is Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery, a sister imprint of Western Trail Blazer, which has published other e-book fiction of mine in the last year.

Trouble in the Labor Camp is a little over 27,000 words, very standard for novella length, about mid-way between short stories (which often end at 5000 words) and novels (which often begin at 50,000 or 60,000 words). As for content, it is representative of one kind of work I have been doing lately in the short and middle-length range—fiction in the mystery/hardboiled/noir style. I call it retro/noir because it is retro in style as well as in the time in which it takes place and because it is noir in its world view.

The setting of this story, as with other pieces I have written in this mode, is rural California of the 1960's. I knew this setting at first hand when I lived in small towns and worked in the fruit fields for several years as I was growing up. As I mentioned in earlier entries here—about a short story entitled “Boom-Boom,” about a novella entitled Dead for the Last Time, and about a prize-winning story entitled “At the End of the Orchard,” I wrote a collection of stories with this setting a few years back, and now, more recently, I have been working with a harder kind of realism that reflects the bleak prospects of doing field work and living in labor camps. The hard realism and the bleak outlook, as suggested above, are characteristic of noir fiction.

In Trouble in the Labor Camp, Morgan Cross is an itinerant farm worker who hopes to move up in the world. In order to do that, he has to try to avoid the kind of trouble that the migrant life lends itself to. As the title implies, trouble comes his way. This story not only has a wealth of realistic detail from a time and place now gone by, but it also has a realistic view of life, in that people do not always defeat their enemies and win romantic happiness. On the other hand, this is not what some people call naturalistic fiction, in which characters are crushed beneath the wheel.

I am very proud of this modest achievement. I feel that I do justice to the world of fruit fields and labor camps, which not many people that I know of have written about since the time of Steinbeck. Also, I am glad to have success in writing middle-length fiction, and I am grateful that recent technology has opened up possibilities for fiction between the typical maximum lengths for short fiction and the typical minimum lengths for novels. So my thanks to Rebecca J. Vickery for venturing into this kind of publishing.

This novella is scheduled to be available in printed form a little later on. Right now it is available as an e-book with Smashwords and Amazon. I hope a few people read it and enjoy it.