Eudora Welty and Mystery
Eudora Welty and Mystery
Hidden in Plain Sight
Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard
Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime.
Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions.
Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”
The prose is accessible throughout. . . . Welty scholars will enjoy these well-argued pieces.
For mystery-crime enthusiasts, this is an enlightening guidebook to an intriguing journey. . . . A mystery woman in many respects, [Eudora Welty] was also—it turns out—an unapologetic fangirl.
In this sparkling collection, editors Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack set out to show, in their own words, ‘that Welty was both a pupil to the mystery genre and a practitioner too’ (22). In this effort, they and their nine fellow contributors succeed abundantly. . . . Not the least of this volume’s rewards is that it makes Welty so fun.
This collection of essays invites a new way to perceive the differences between literary genres, as well as how women authors can use the tropes of a particular genre to expose the problems that underly them.
Eudora Welty and Mystery’s core strength, then, lies in what it is and is not. It is a tour de force, a must-read for those in the Welty world and adjacent fields. What it is not is limited to that community. The book is well written, digestible, at times even riveting, especially for anyone with a taste for mysteries, crime fiction, and noir variations. In toto, the collection is a veritable treasure trove of innovative scholarship that will inevitably produce more sleuths working to decipher Welty’s puzzle-texts that are often simply hidden in plain sight.
As the nine essays in Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight illustrate in multiple ways, Welty’s mysteries are most certainly of the wild kind. The essays plumb the depths of the risks and rewards of ‘serious daring’ (Words 104), of love and anger, of horror and delight in Welty’s life and fiction. This collection reveals in new ways Welty’s talent for eluding the critical and biographical confines we seek to impose upon her. Eudora Welty continues to be wilder than we expect.
Eudora Welty and Mystery sheds abundant light on this confluence, demonstrating Welty’s ingenious way of signifying on noir tropes in particular and the mystery genre in general, exposing the injustices that lie beneath the surface – whether that of respectable Southern society or the implicit assumptions that have dominated the books and movies that have been consumed for decades. This collection of essays invites a new way to perceive the differences between literary genres, as well as how women authors can use the tropes of a particular genre to expose the problems that underly them
Eudora Welty and Mystery constitutes an unexpected, surprising, but productive approach to the works of a major American twentieth-century writer.
Focusing on the influence exerted by the mystery/detective fiction genre on Welty’s writing, Eudora Welty and Mystery unambiguously opens an overlooked and original avenue of inquiry. The essays powerfully evoke Welty, the late modernist caught in a postmodernist pose, and showcase some of her best critics patiently and cleverly teasing out various textual refractions and echoes.
Jacob Agner is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Mississippi. As a recipient of the Eudora Welty Research Fellowship, funded by the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, he has examined the writer’s correspondence for connections to film history and film noir. Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston, is author of Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman and editor of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race; Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race; Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (with Christopher Metress); Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? (with Suzanne Marrs); and Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America. She now serves as editor of University Press of Mississippi’s book series Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty.
