Picket Line and Other Stories

These three stories--'Picket Line', 'Chick Killer' and 'Ice Man'--show Elmore Leonard at his most terse and harsh, able to conjure up a sense of profound unease and injustice in just a few words.

The main story 'Picket Line' describes a tense stand-off between migrant workers in Texas, police and labour organisers in a brilliantly orchestrated series of arguments and negotiations, with the potential for terrible violence lurking in every exchange. 'Chick Killer' and 'Ice Man', set in Florida and California are two riffs on the thing that made Leonard great: his extraordinary ear for creating dialogues of negotiation, where the stakes could not be higher for the loser.

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.

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