Book Review: The Beautiful Cigar Girl - Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashower

“He was a poor drunk devil who had no defenses against the world,” said Franz Kafka about Edgar Allan Poe. “So he fled into drunkenness. Imagination only served him as a crutch... Imagination has fewer pitfalls than reality has.”

Kafka, who knew a thing or two about imagination and pitfall-ravaged reality, spoke in a general sense about Poe’s artistry and accomplishment amidst a lifelong minefield where conflict, failure, or self-destruction was always just another step or stumble away. From dropping out of the University of Virginia and West Point, to his alcoholism, perennial impoverishment, and doomed marriage to his tuberculosis-ridden cousin, Poe seemed to either court hardship, or have it fall into his lap.

But more specifically, and as meticulously detailed in Daniel Stashower’s beguiling brew of biography, social history, and thriller, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, the Czech writer might just as well have been referring to Poe’s original approach to his ripped-from-the-penny-press story "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," in which Poe's intention to produce a tale of embellished mystery and imagination — and his hopes for a quick buck — ran into some real life setbacks at the last turn.

The initial conception for “Marie Rogêt,” however, seemed straightforward, triggered as it was by the true life tragedy of a 20-year-old Manhattan tobacco store clerk — “the comely seegar vendor” — Mary Rogers, an alluring beauty who effortlessly achieved a certain celebrity with a modern famous-for-being-famous connotation. “It is a most curious thing,” noted one newsman. “Her notoriety is unencumbered by position or achievement.”

In any case, Stashower shows, Mary did draw customers and attention — maybe too much attention. When her bruised and beaten body was discovered in the Hudson River along the Hoboken, New Jersey, shoreline on July 28, 1841, her clothes torn, a cord wrapped around her neck, and with other signs of violent and sexual assault, ye olde 19th century New York media circus commenced. Newspapers, who knew where their readers’ prurient interests lay, broke into circulation wars fueled by sensationalism and speculation as, month after month, the crime remained unsolved.

The safe-target consensus — almost against reason and evidence — among public officials and New York’s unregulated police force was that the murder was committed by one of the city’s notorious gangs. The consequent public indignation erupted and subsided while more likely individual suspects — including two suitors — were being rounded up and dismissed, so as a year went by without an arrest that stuck, it became increasingly more convenient to blame the faceless members of the Plug-Uglies or the Hudson Dusters.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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