Eudora Welty and mystery.

Eudora Welty, 1980.
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

The 2019 Eudora Welty Conference, which will be hosted by the College of Charleston on February 21–23, will include the February 22 panel "Welty and Mystery," with the following presentations:

Eudora Welty’s Career in Mystery Fiction. Harriet Pollack (College of Charleston)

Chester Himes, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty: The Civil Rights Movement on a Crime Fiction Continuum. Jacob Agner (Univ of Mississippi)

Murder, Mystery, and Motivation: Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter and Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. Sarah Ford (Baylor Univ)

Wanted Dead Or Alive: Last Years’ Dead Branches. Rebecca Mark (Tulane Univ)

“The Writer as Detective Hero”:  Eudora Welty and Her Late Fiction. Suzanne Marrs (Millsaps College)

I would imagine the relationship between Welty and Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) will be discussed, including Welty's famous review of Macdonald's The Underground Man. Further details can be found in Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence between Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, ed. Marrs and Tom Nolan (Macdonald's biographer).

Tom Nolan on Ross Macdonald.

Meanwhile There Are Letters:
The Correspondence of Eudora Welty
and Ross Macdonald 
(ed. Marrs and Nolan, July 2015)

On the Library of America blog Reader's Almanac Tom Nolan posts part 2 of his series on the life and work of Lew Archer creator Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar). Part 2 discusses the Canadian-influenced Millar's view of California, the state where he elected to live and set his work. Part 1 deals with the relationship of Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's work to Macdonald's.

Not much mystery action at June 23rd Bloomsbury auction.

The June 23rd Bloomsbury auction that received press for the lack of interest in some of the Steinbeck items also displayed tepid attention to the mystery-related offerings:

• James Grady signed works, including books from the Condor series (Six Days of the Condor, etc.): Unsold.

• M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: Unsold.

• Ross Macdonald, The Far Side of the Dollar, $300 (valued bet. $1000 and $1500); Sleeping Beauty, $150 (valued bet. $500 and $700) ; proof of The Instant Enemy, with "Boucher" written and circled in red pencil (probably critic-writer Anthony Boucher), $150; Self-Portrait, signed by Macdonald and Eudora Welty, $150.

• Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Copy owned by John Dos Passos, valued bet. $1200 and $1800: Unsold.

• Mary Roberts Rinehart, signed card: Unsold.

There was also a completely delightful inscribed copy of Christopher Morley's I Know a Secret for Dorothy Parker, in which Morley drew pixies (valued bet. $1200–1800, unsold).

Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer.

There's an interesting article posted online, "Ross Macdonald's Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study in Influence," by Robert F. Moss. In it, Moss compares and contrasts Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer and the lives of Fitzgerald and Macdonald; he also discusses Macdonald's annotations in The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Dorothy Parker), which suggest that Macdonald was seriously studying the craft of Fitzgerald's writing. The article also includes photographs of two pages of Macdonald's notes.