Picket Line: The Lost Novella
Elmore Leonard
Mariner Books/An Imprint of Random House (September 2025)
Introducing “the Charles Dickens of Detroit”
Many novellas seem (at least to me) originally intended to be novels prior to aggressive editing. Channeling Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s concept, the best novellas illustrate a near-perfect creation: there is nothing to add or take away to improve it. For example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Joszeph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Nikolai Gogal’s The Overcoat, Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Each is a classic within its genre.
Although Elmore Leonard’s Picket Line (abandoned until now) may not deserve to be included among these novellas, I agree with Héctor Tobar’s observations in his review in The New York Times (September 27, 2025): ” Like most of Leonard’s other books, Picket Line is a taut and engaging tale. Crime dramas made Leonard famous, but this is a social-justice story. Two Chicano men, Chino and Paco, drive across a barren Texas landscape in the 1970s. They reach the farmland of the Rio Grande Valley, where they enter a world of racism, exploitation and movement activism. Leonard renders their adventures and their thoughts in spare, elegant, Hemingway-inspired prose.”
Later in the review: “The novella gains momentum as it flows from one briefly sketched and absorbing scene to the next. The short chapters feel like narrative descriptions of film storyboards — which is precisely what they were meant to be.” As the journalist C.M. Kushins explains in an enlightening introduction, Leonard wrote Picket Line to win [a film producer] over with his own imagery and characterization for their ‘fruit picker’ movie. The novella is really a film rendered in prose. It has the cinematic mastery of scene and dialogue that characterized Leonard’s later works, including Get Shorty and Rum Punch, novels that transformed him into a best-selling author whose works Hollywood loved to adapt.”
I agree with Tobar that Picket Line disappoints, however, when the story reaches its final chapters. “From its very first pages, the novella suggests that the picker Chino is headed for a face-off with the union leader Mora. When that encounter happens, Leonard falls back on the hard-boiled, crime-novel dialogue that would serve him well later in his career. In Picket Line, however, the attempt to give the story a gritty twist falls flat — and feels false to the real-life Latino history that inspired the tale.”
Maybe that’s why Leonard kept Picket Line shelved for so long. Or perhaps it was cursed: Leonard retrieved the manuscript in the early 2000s when he was asked to contribute to a new online magazine, but the venture went under just before the novella was to be published. (It was an odd partnership; at that point Leonard didn’t even own a computer.)
In his Introduction to Picket Line, G.M. Kushins observes, those who read it “will see an early leanness to Leonard’s leanness Prose and a coolness in how characters’ looks and behaviors are given only through the eye of a different behholder…But Picket Line also finds Leonard at his most overtly iterary, substituting the threat of crime or menace for the suspense of human drama; faith, racism, and views of the social outsaider governed by notnone, but two patriarchal forces — in this case both the corrupt Bravo County troopers and the operators of Stanzik Farms — would all be right at home within the works oƒ John Steinbeck.”
In Kushins’s recounting of the book’s journey to publication, Leonard’s many fans will get a rare glimpse into “the crazy orbit of literary agents, movie producers and Hollywood stars that surrounded him.” And in the novella itself they will no doubt enjoy witnessing the prose voice of the master storyteller resurrected.
That said, I recommend Picket Line as well as Kushins’s superb biography, Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, published by Mariner Books/An Imprint of Random House (2025).