PICKET LINE: The Lost Novella, by Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard was already a successful novelist and screenwriter when the film producer Howard Jaffe approached Leonard’s agent with an idea for a movie about a heroic fruit picker. It was 1970, and Jaffe wanted a screenplay centered on someone like Cesar Chavez, the Catholic, Mexican American activist who led campaigns to unionize farmworkers in California’s Central Valley.
In response, Leonard researched farming, trade unions and the biographies of religious firebrands. He wrote one draft after another, trying in vain to align his vision with Jaffe’s. To better convey his ideas, he put together a prose “typescript” that eventually became a novella — only to learn that the producer had dropped the project.
Leonard was able to repurpose some of his research into the screenplay for the Charles Bronson vehicle “Mr. Majestyk,” a 1974 crime thriller about a shotgun-toting melon grower. But the novella, titled “Picket Line,” stayed on the shelf. Now, a dozen years after the author’s death, we can finally read this early work for ourselves.
Like all of Leonard’s 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.
Chino and Paco quickly pass the narrative baton to other strong-willed characters, including an Anglo policeman, a university-educated Latina union organizer and a Black man from Detroit who joins a crew of scab pickers. In this way, “Picket Line” builds a convincing portrait of the spirit of a lost, idealistic age.
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The post A Lost Novella by Elmore Leonard With a Social-Justice Bent appeared first on New York Times.
