Publisher: Mariner Books
Publish Date: September 30, 2025
Pages: 128
Language: English
Type: Hardback
ISBN: 9780063389366
Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.5 inches
I recently picked up Picket Line, a new book by Elmore Leonard (d. 2013), because it felt like Easter: new Elmore Leonard material, a decade after his death—I’m not his biggest fan but I’m definitely going to check it out. The fact that it’s one of those “almost history” books—written, abandoned, rescued, forgotten, rescued again—adds to the excitement.
Tim O’Brien (who wrote the great Vietnam memoir, The Things They Carried) blurbed it as “the best of a magnificent writer’s magnificent books,” which, well, “best” can’t be true, but I get the spirit. Written more than five decades ago, this is Leonard on the brink of becoming Leonard—the moment the voice sharpens and clicks into place. The era when he’s shedding the TV-western training wheels and discovering the sleek, character-first, dialogue-tuned engine that would later give us Get Shorty and Out of Sight.
According to the precise and maybe overly-detailed intro by C.M. Kushins, Leonard started the manuscript in 1970 for a film that never got made. Decades later, in the year 2000, when ebooks were struggling to become real, he sent it to Contentville, an early e-book publisher that folded before releasing it. And so it sat went back on the shelf.
The book begins on a highway, not a picket line. You ride into the story beside Chino and Paco, drifting from California into Texas, half aimless, half ominous, already seeming like something violent is about to happen. Only later do we reach the farmworker strike led by Mora, a former priest turned union organizer with the kind of charisma that has nothing to do with symmetry or jawlines and everything to do with conviction. At his side is Connie Chavez, electric on the bullhorn, getting under the skin of every foreman in earshot.
The cops, the laborers, the administrators, even the small-town gawkers—Leonard sketches them with such clarity that no one reads like scenery. Everyone acts out of motive, pride, boredom, or appetite. Even when the tension boils into genuine violence, you get the sense that Leonard understands every position in the conflict, even the ugly ones.
A parallel story runs across the picket line through Bud Davis, a college kid picking melons for cash, who has already demonstrated he doesn’t scare easy. The novella keeps returning to the idea that solidarity is the kind of thing you can’t “get” from the outside. You cross over to join the picket line, or you don’t. That’s a key theme in the book, and I might be forcing it but it puts me in mind of the leap of faith that Kierkegaard describes in Fear and Trembling.
One of the best surprises is from the book design, rather than narrative: the endpapers reproduce Leonard’s typed planning notes and handwriting—little maps and psyche sketches, motive diagrams, character descriptions. Most revealing to me was seeing that Leonard himself considered Bud Davis the story’s key character, even though Chino often feels like the magnetic center of the published book. It’s a testament not just to Leonard’s instincts, but to how alive the material was, even for him.
I closed the book feeling the way you hope to after reading something recovered rather than released—like I wasn’t sold a product so much as handed evidence. The evidence, in this case, is that Leonard had already figured out the magnetism, the economy, and the moral clarity long before the world caught up. A joy to read. A gift to receive.