When a Mystery Leads to Murder

In Welty’s 1971 novel, the garrulous Renfro-Beecham clan undertakes to identify the parents of Jack’s bride, Gloria Short, a county orphan now married into the family. The genre-bending novel weighs issues of evidence and proof as it drolly modifies familiar “country-house mystery” convention, flipping the form’s traditional upper-class British setting to locate the case in a Mississippi “shotgun” homestead. There, no celebrated detective works the puzzle; instead, the family deems themselves a sort of kith and kin investigative team, intending to diminish the resented bride to a mystery they have solved. This chapter ––creating crime-boards on suspect parental pairings–– follows more clues than its reunion members, or previous critics, have thought to use. Moreover, as Welty thickens, rather than resolves, the novel’s mysteries, all versions of the past lead to another crime. A murderer confesses, mid-novel and without consequences, causing the essay to reassess the novel’s covert investigation into felonious whiteness.