While crime writing is often dismissed as popular rather than serious fiction, Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, who late in life had become close friends, believed that distinctions between literary and mystery fiction were artificial and destructive; they felt that intersections between the genres had been key to works by many writers, including themselves. In addition, each felt that the novel of detection was well suited to the complex investigation of heart-felt, autobiographical concerns, perhaps at times more suited than literary fiction; each used genre fiction to explore imaginative autobiography and personal relationships, including the one they shared. The word “confluence,” which Welty believed “exists as a reality and a symbol in one,” thus defines a pattern of experience not only for two individuals but also for these two writers.