House Of Mystery 1951 198

A master artist gives his soul to Satan for the ability to be twins, one who can paint and one who can party. When a Martian child crash-lands on his remote island, Fred Marshall is taught a lesson in turning his back on humanity.

A puppeteer is evicted from his house and dies without knowing that the children he entertained have not forgotten him. His puppets come to life to exact revenge on the heartless man who stole their master’s home.

The Mayans vanished because one of their number fell in love with a girl from a neighboring tribe who was taken by the priests to be sacrificed. In his rage he cursed his home city to a vanishing doom.

A white plantation owner gets into a voodoo duel with his laborers.

A skydiver lands at the House of Mystery, but Cain learns that the unexpected guest is already dead.

Two ghosts don’t know that they are dead, and they perceive the two living people in their house to be ghosts until the living man says to his wife that the previous owners died from a gas leak, at which point the ghosts realize that they are dead.

The peasants ask Dravos to kill the werewolf that is terrorizing their valley; little do they know that they are exchanging a werewolf for something more sinister.

“SIR GREELEY’S REVENGE!” A rich man wills half his fortune to an orphan if he can play the piano well at a concert, so the man’s relatives try to damage the boy’s hands. The rich man’s ghost becomes enraged at their behavior and drowns them in a mound of gold coins.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”