Picket Line
Elmore Leonard's lost novella, plus Michael Crichton's Runaway
Happy Holidays!
Picket Line is billed as Elmore Leonard’s lost novella. I don’t know how lost it was, or whether it’s really a novella. It reads like the first third of an unfinished novel that ends before it really kicks off.
That said, it’s 100 pages by Leonard at the midpoint between his early westerns and more famous crime novels. It’s also political and racial in a way his stories normally avoid. It’s about a fruit pickers’ strike of mostly Hispanic workers being harassed by mostly white authority figures.
Leonard cares about the subject and the people—to be honest, it’s strange to read Leonard caring so much. Part of his brand as a “cool” author is a distance or detachment from his characters and their fates. Even Pagan Babies, his Rwandan genocide caper novel, holds that atrocity at remove.
Picket Line reads like a scrapped first stab at Mr. Majestyk, which took out all that caring and politics and replaced it with a much more cool action story. It’s a smart tradeoff. In the film version of Majestyk, Charles Bronson and Al Lettieri are well-matched adversaries.
The action in Picket Line is spread over a great many characters, including strikers, pickers, bosses, and cops, none of which really knit together satisfyingly. But each is entertaining enough.
And at the end, it just ends.
Maybe Leonard isn’t the best writer to cover a strike of Chicano fruit pickers in Texas, but Picket Line is a fun hundred pages.
Shot in Vancouver Update: watched Runaway, starring Tom Selleck as a cop who specializes in stopping malfunctioning household robots, and Gene Simmons as an evil programmer.
If there’s a case to be made for Runaway, it’s that Michael Crichton (who wrote and directed) put a lot of thought into the near-future world. Maybe too much. It came out around the same time as The Terminator, and while the T-800 exoskeleton is a beautifully menacing design, the robots in Runaway are meant to be ordinary household objects.
Nice list. I’ve never heard of this Novella and I love Elmore Leonard. I will have to check this out.
Was unaware of a posthumous Elmore Leonard novella. Will have to check it out. I think my favourite posthumous release is Manchette's Ivory Pearl. Not really one of his best novels (and in fact kinda cringe when you realize the title is the 'ironic' name given to the Black protagonist), but I liked how the last half (third?) of the book is just the author's notes on where he wanted the story to go, and it's fun to let yourself dream about what could have been in his disenchanted leftwing spy series.