Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight ed. by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight ed. by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack Jay Watson (bio) Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight. Eds. Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2023. 256 pp. 10 b&w illustrations. $99.00 hardcover, $30.00 paperback. 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. Welty's engagement with mystery and crime fiction, as both reader and writer, began early and never abated, though critics have for the most part been slow to take up the author's relationship to the form and its conventions. This volume changes that. At sixteen, Welty was already parodying Golden Age mystery writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Carolyn Wells in the pages of the student newspaper at Mississippi State College for Women, where she published "The Great Pinnington Solves the Mystery" in 1925, accompanied by a pair of cartoons she penned herself. And she was still, to use Agner and Pollack's term, "sport[ing] with the genre" (22) in late unpublished stories such as "The Alterations" and "The Shadow Club." Along the way, she irreverently and inventively bent mystery conventions to the modernist aims of "her signature story form," "the minimalist puzzle-text" (20), and she formed one of the most significant literary friendships of her era with mystery writer Ken Millar (who published as Ross Macdonald), richly documented in a thirteen-year correspondence that ended with Millar's death in 1983. The introduction, nine essays, and appendix of Eudora Welty and Mystery comb Welty's published oeuvre and her archive for clues to how a form too often maligned as lowbrow kindled the imagination of a luminous literary artist. And when I say "clues," I don't mean it figuratively. Several essays bring out the detective in the literary critic, piecing together neglected bits of [End Page 157] textual evidence to uncover unsuspected plots, crimes, and identities, building new readings of Welty classics. Andrew Leiter, for instance, attends to young Loch Morrison's sleuthing in The Golden Apples, which expands and deepens the novel's coming-of-age plot to include queerer figures and desires afoot in Morgana than are usually attributed to the narrative's sexual bildung. Rebecca Mark revisits the contradictory accounts of Bonnie Dee Peacock's death in The Ponder Heart and finds them all to be alibis, cover stories for Bonnie Dee's successful escape from the text: the getaway of an unhappy, young wife who joins Edna Earle Ponder and domestic worker Narciss in harboring murderous designs on the overbearing patriarch, Daniel Ponder. Pollack conducts her own investigation into the orphaned Gloria Short's disputed origins in Losing Battles, posing her own likely suspects before noting how this enigma, much discussed and debated by the Renfro-Beecham clan, works to distract reader and characters alike from—and thus to forestall any conscientious reckoning with—Nathan Beecham's blurted confession that he has murdered Herman Dearman and let an anonymous Black man hang for the crime. The deeper mystery of Losing Battles, Pollack argues—one that powerfully implicates Mississippi's mid-century racial regime—lies in how matter-of-factly a Black man can be scapegoated while "the white male offender is ultimately left free to wander the world" (174). Meanwhile, Suzanne Marrs finds, in the amnesia that afflicts the protagonist of "The Shadow Club," Justine, after a traumatic assault, an imaginative exploration on Welty's part of the memory loss suffered by her dear friend Millar as he descended into Alzheimer's disease. By using the mystery genre as a form of "imaginative autobiography," Marrs asserts, Welty was actually following Ross Macdonald's lead in novels such as Sleeping Beauty where Millar had used fiction to explore his relationship with his troubled daughter (211). Not the least of this volume's rewards is that it makes Welty so fun. Not that she really needs the assist, of course: readers and scholars have long...