UNEARTHED ELMORE: ELMORE LEONARD'S PICKET LINE

Nearing Elmore Leonard's birthday, Mariner Publishing unearthed Picket Line a novella he wrote at a crossroads of his career. Still known more as western writer and toiling as a screenwriter in the early seventies, he and a producer were pitching a movie influenced by labor leader Cesar Chavez. At one point, he fleshed out the treatment to give people a better idea of what they had in mind. What could have been a great seventies movie (One could see Robert Altman or Hal Ashby directing)., came to be a promotional piece of fiction that went into his collected papers. Now, we get to read and spend a few more moments with a writer who meant so much to a lot of us.

The story takes place on the Texas border where union organizer Vincent Mora leads a strike of melon pickers. Ex con Chino Rojas comes into town with his brother Paco. The two are looking for work, but Chino wants to get close to Vincent. The strike creates a standoff in the town with people on each side and others caught in the middle, including Public Safety cop Captain Frank McKellan, wanting to shut it down, Vietnam vet and deputy Harold Ritchie, caught between the law and his sympathies, Connie Chavez a a revolutionary in love with her bullhorn as much as the cause, and Bud Davis, a college student who takes a picker job and gets his eyes opened.

Actually, almost every character receives awareness by the end of the story. The book reminds me of John Nichol's The Milagro Beanfield War without the magical realism and more of a pragmatic approach. Mora has a great conversation with Chino near the end about how he has to temper down the revolutionary fervor of the union members and focus on the bargaining between them and the melon growers. Many became aware of the bigger picture of what their involved ion. They begin to understand the human element that the politics obscurs.

Leonard plays with a lot of elements he will lean into in his following books. He later uses the name Vincent Mora for the cop hero in Glitz, his first book to break the NYT top ten. The opening chapter with migrants not being allowed to use a gas station restroom was practically dropped into the the script and novelization of Mr. Majestyk as well as the author's research on melon farming. This also may be the first time he uses a ensemble to pack a powder ke of suspense with everybody's differing agendas.

The main complaint I have with with the book, Leoanrd can't be blamed for, He wrote it for studio execs and people in development to get a better idea of the film they wanted to make, not someone looking for a good read. The limited pages don't allow the many characters to be fully formed. we don't get to hang out with them in the the way we do in most Elmore Leonard novels. They feel more like sketches of characters.. It helps if you cast actors to a character when they are introduced. A young Raul Julia would have made a great Chino or Mora. If you think in the terms of when it was written, you can picture Warren Oates as Captain McKellan, Stacy Keach as Ritchie, and Jeff Bridges as Bud.

If you're a die hard Elmore Leonard fan like myself, you'll find Picket Line a welcome discovery. Not only does does it give us one more read from the master, we get to see him develop techniques that will help make him the writer we admire. We also see him take on the rare political topic, finding its human elements as much as he did in crime.