Book Review

By Derryll White

Leonard, Elmore (2025).  Picket Line – The Lost Novella

 “the poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers” – from Britain’s New Medical Express

Not really elegant, but perhaps a fair review of Elmore Leonard (1925-2013). Ernest Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls got him started as a writer. For Leonard simplicity was always the key, his writing has always been character-led, fast-paced and without distracting digressions.

Picket Line follows that diagram all the way. Written in 1970 it was abandoned in Leonard’s home archive after going the rounds with Howard Jaffe over the 1965 Delano grape strike and its leader Cesar Chavez. They didn’t come to an agreement, Leonard writing Jaffe: “Now consider for a moment that individual commitment is the key idea: a man standing up to be counted in spite of his fear of the overwhelming odds against him.” Anyone who has walked a picket line knows that feeling.

Leonard follows his own rules of writing in this novella, avoiding prologue and cutting directly to the chase. His own method was to let the characters speak and act naturally, “if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

He had started to make it big in the contemporary crime genre with The Big Bounce (1969) and that momentum carries into this work. Chino de la Cruz and Paco Rojas appear polite but infused with moral complexity – they go on to break the law to settle scores and get pulled into the strikers’ cause.

The characters excel. There is Bud Davis, a white Xavier University student who gets a broader education here. Also Connie Chavez, a bundle of rebellious energy who skirts with revolutionary fervor. And Vietnam enters in the guise of Luis Tamez, an old striker whose grandson served in Vietnam. Leonard builds them all into a reluctant force that holds the line.

Throughout his writing life Elmore Leonard kept his nose and ear to the ground of seething Detroit and that feeling shines clearly in his depiction of the union struggling against Stanzik Farms with its wealth and power. If one reads a little deeper there is a glimmer of why Donald Trump, some 50 years later, might want to get rid of these migrant field workers.

Picket Line is a gift to readers who have lamented Elmore Leonard’s passing. It should also be recognized that he has influenced some of our best still writing, such as George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane and Laura Lippman.

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Excerpt from the book:

STRIKERS: There was a man on the picket line by the name of Luis Tamez who was related to Connie Chavez, an uncle of her mother.  He had worked as a migrant for more than forty years in fields from Texas to Michigan and in Montana.  This was his first strike and he was enjoying it, watching the workers fighting the melons, knowing he would never do it again unless they paid him what he wanted.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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