“By the time they became acquainted, in 1970, both were well established in their fields – Welty in that nebulous genre called Southern literature, and Macdonald in hard-boiled detective fiction. … With the ice broken, Welty and Millar struck up an epistolary friendship that endured until his death in 1983, exchanging some 345 letters. … Can it come as any surprise, then, that these letters occasionally read like the prelude to a courtship?”