Picket Line and Other Stories
Published on 2. October 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-0-241-75539-6 (ISBN)
Description
Three stories - the never-before-published 'Picket Line', along with 'Chick Killer' and 'Ice Man' - showing Elmore Leonard at his most terse and thrilling
'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. . . . Leonard renders their adventures and their thoughts in spare, elegant, Hemingway-inspired prose. . . . Picket Line builds a convincing portrait of the spirit of a lost, idealistic age. . . . It has the cinematic mastery of scene and dialogue that characterized Leonard's later works' - Hector Tobar, The New York Times
There are some lines you should never cross...
Trouble is in the air at Stanzik Farms, Texas. The workers have gone on strike and tensions are threatening to boil over. As secrets come to a head and migrant workers, cops, foremen, agitators and union bosses collide at the picket line, things start to get very rough indeed. Elmore Leonard's brilliantly orchestrated, never-before-published story Picket Line is accompanied here by two more terse tales of ruthless enforcers and tense stand-offs, riffing on the thing that made him great: his extraordinary ear for dialogue, and for creating situations where the stakes could not be higher for the loser.
'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. . . . Leonard renders their adventures and their thoughts in spare, elegant, Hemingway-inspired prose. . . . Picket Line builds a convincing portrait of the spirit of a lost, idealistic age. . . . It has the cinematic mastery of scene and dialogue that characterized Leonard's later works' - Hector Tobar, The New York Times
There are some lines you should never cross...
Trouble is in the air at Stanzik Farms, Texas. The workers have gone on strike and tensions are threatening to boil over. As secrets come to a head and migrant workers, cops, foremen, agitators and union bosses collide at the picket line, things start to get very rough indeed. Elmore Leonard's brilliantly orchestrated, never-before-published story Picket Line is accompanied here by two more terse tales of ruthless enforcers and tense stand-offs, riffing on the thing that made him great: his extraordinary ear for dialogue, and for creating situations where the stakes could not be higher for the loser.
Reviews / Votes
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. . . . Leonard renders their adventures and their thoughts in spare, elegant, Hemingway-inspired prose. . . . Picket Line builds a convincing portrait of the spirit of a lost, idealistic age. . . . It has the cinematic mastery of scene and dialogue that characterized Leonard's later works -- Hector Tobar * The New York Times *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
91 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-75539-6 (9780241755396)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) began his long and extraordinary career as a writer of Westerns, most famously a story which was made into the film 3:10 To Yuma. He then became known for his remarkable sequence of crime novels, generally set in Michigan or Florida. A master of funny and threatening dialogue, his influence has been incalculable. Leonard received the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN US and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.