By the time he died in 2013 at the age of 87, writer Elmore Leonard had long been revered as a master of not one by two genres of fiction.

In his lifetime, Leonard produced more than 40 novels of the Old West and contemporary American crime (mostly the latter); scores of short stories that spanned decades; and a shelfful of screenplays and movie treatments.

But there was one work by “The Dickens of Detroit” (or, as Time magazine’s J.D. Reed originally named him, “The Dickens from Detroit”), that sprung from his typewriter which combined a bit of all three. Written in 1970, it sat in Leonard’s archives for more than five decades. Until now, when fans can finally lay their eyes on Picket Line: The Lost Novella (128 pp., $24.99, Mariner).

In the course of researching his recent de

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