William Faulkner

Both William Faulkner and Eudora Welty were avid readers of mystery novels, but only Faulkner actually wrote detective fiction. In 1946, his “An Error in Chemistry” won second prize in the first detective short story contest conducted by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That runner-up later appeared in Knight’s Gambit, Faulkner’s 1949 collection of six detective short stories featuring the lawyer Gavin Stevens. The cover design on the late 1950s Greek edition O Kapnos Ke Alla Diegemata graphically highlights the collection’s murderous elements.

On loan from Faulkner’s library at Rowan Oak [were] vintage paperbacks (pictured below) by such luminaries as Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, Eric Ambler, and Agatha Christie. An unexpected Faulkner mystery association is his appearance as a fictional character in the Hollywood setting of Stuart Kaminisky’s Never Cross a Vampire (1980), which additionally features Bela Lugosi. Faulkner also makes a brief fictional appearance in Elliott Roosevelt’s Murder at Midnight (1997).

During his stints as a screenwriter in Hollywood, Faulkner adapted for film Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, a Philip Marlowe private eye novel. He also worked on the screenplay for a never-produced film based on Dreadful Hollow, a traditional English mystery novel written by Irina Karlova.

[See also: Mississippi Matinee: An Exhibition of the State and the Silver Screen for more about Faulkner's experiences in Hollywood.]

Mystery paperbacks from Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi

• 13 at Dinner / Agatha Christie. Dell 60 (1933)
• The Secret of Father Brown and Other Stories / Gilbert K. Chesterton. Popular Library 153 (1948)
• The 39 Steps / John Buchan. Pocket 69 (A Kangaroo Book, 1941)
• A Coffin for Dimitrios / Eric Ambler Pocket Books pb 232 (1943)
• The A.B.C. Murders / Agatha Christie. Pocket Books 88 (A Kangaroo Book, 1941)
• Murder in the Calais Coach / Agatha Christie. Pocket Books 79 (A Kangaroo Book, 1940)
• The Trouble with Murder / Roger Bax. Pocket Book 716 (1950)
• The Frightened Pigeon / Richard Burke. Dell 204 (1944)
• The Case of the Borrowed Brunette / Erle Stanley Gardner. Pocket Book 856 (1952)
• Cards on the Table / Agatha Christie. Dell 293 (1949)
• The Saint vs. Scotland Yard / Leslie Charteris. Avon's Murder Mystery Monthly 32 (1945)
• Hardly a Man is Now Alive / Herbert Brean. Dell 675 (1950)
• Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Nurse Keate murder mystery / Mignon G. Eberhart. Dell 136 (1946)
• The Big Fear / Theo Durrant. Popular Library 507 (1953)
• And So To Murder / Carter Dickson. Dell 175. (1946)
• Let me kill you, Sweetheart! / Fletcher Flora. Avon 811 (1958)
• Premeditated Murder / Peter Cheyney. Avon's Murder mystery monthly 15 (1943)
• The Strangled Witness / Leslie Ford. Popular Library 158 (1948)
• Death on the Nile / Agatha Christie. Avon 317 (1951)
• The League of Frightened Men / Rex Stout. Avon Pocket size Books (1942)
• The Boomerang Clue / Agatha Christie. Dell 664 (1953)
• The Case of the Lazy Lover / Erle Stanley Gardner. Pocket 909 (1952)
• Death in the Air / Agatha Christie. Avon 89 (1946)
• The Death of a Worldly Woman / A. B. Cunningham. Dell 365 (1948)
• Dealing Out Death / W. T. Ballard. A Graphic Mystery. no. 72 (1954)

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/ms_mystery/64/https://egrove.olemiss.edu/ms_mystery/64

Eudora Welty

While not a contributor to the mystery genre, Eudora Welty was a constant reader and avowed fan of the form. She contributed an introduction to the 1969 suspense anthology Hanging by a Thread, and numerous Welty blurbs appear on the dust jackets of English mysteries written by Andrew Garve, Michael Gilbert, Patrick McGinley, Margaret Yorke, and others. Her closest connection to the field was Kenneth Millar (a.k.a. Ross MacDonald). Welty wrote a favorable, front page review of Macdonald’s The Underground Man for the New York Times Book Review. Macdonald returned the favor by dedicating his novel Sleeping Beauty to Welty. The Faulkner Investigation, a 1985 limited edition, brings Faulkner, Welty, and MacDonald together in an examination of their “triangular literary and personal affinities.”

Indeed murder is brutal. But there is a wonder to the human act which can only be approached through the mind, for it lies in the mind -- in the mind of the murderer or that of his victim or possibly, more often than we know, in the peculiar combination of the two minds meeting. Murder’s fascination for the reader stems from wonder, and has nothing to do with what De Quincey in scorn expressed as “a knife, a purse, and a dark lane.” The fascination of Joan Kahn’s Hanging by a Thread is the thread itself -- that thread of human frailty on which, so often and so literally, life and death depend.

-- Eudora Welty’s “Introduction” in Hanging by a Thread (1969).

William Faulkner. "An Error in Chemistry" in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (June 1946). Title page.

-- “Smoke” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (October 1947)

-- Knight’s Gambit. New York: Random House, 1949.

-- O Kapnos, Ke Alla Diegemata. Athens: Atlantis, c.1950s. (Greek Translation: Knight’s Gambit)

-- The Saint Mystery Magazine (September 1962) with William Faulkner’s "The Liar."

-- Mystery paperbacks from William Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak. Photograph.

Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

Ross Macdonald and Eudora Welty. The Faulkner Investigation. Santa Barbara: Cordelia Editions, 1985.

Eudora Welty. Introduction. Hanging by a Thread. Ed. by Joan Kahn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969.