Eudora Welty and Mystery

Eudora Welty says, in a letter to Kenneth Millar, that she read James M. Cain’s crime fiction late (and had “fun” with it)—in the 1970s—decades after her mother (a devoteé of the “Golden Age”) read, and disapproved of, him and his writing. This chapter ventures that noir is constant but evolving, and that Welty the daughter was a member of the age of Chandler and the hardboiled aesthetic. She need not like or dislike noir or its practitioners, but she could and did adapt it to the currents of her fiction. Noir’s familiar elements (misogyny, road and car culture, gestating violence, ultimate doom) are re-mixed in her work. So it is with Welty’s novella The Ponder Heart and her short story “No Place For You, My Love.” We read Welty in the tradition of the detective novel, and hardly know it.