Book Review: The Beautiful Cigar Girl - Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashower - Page 2

This is where Edgar Allan Poe, who never believed that a “gang of ruffians” were involved, came in to re-ignite the smoldering citywide embers with an audacious literary scheme designed to accomplish several goals. In addition to furthering his own writing and editing career (he had plans to start his own magazine), Poe’s immediate goal was to take up the case of Mary Rogers' murder and look at it with a fresh and untried slant meant to help solve the crime itself. His strategy was inspired by revisiting his groundbreaking 1841 detective story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which introduced such by-now familiar mystery story elements as the contemplative sleuth, his dense sidekick, the improbable villain, the falsely-accused suspect, and the impossible, locked-room crime.

More specifically, Poe, in tracing the twists and turns of the Mary Rogers cold case and closely paralleling a plausible and entrancing whodunit, would re-set "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" in the streets of Paris and bring back his lead character, the brilliant amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin, often found “sitting steadily in his accustomed armchair,” would marshal his powers of observation and deductive reasoning, or “ratiocination,” and offer in narrative form conclusions — Poe’s theories by extention -- presumably persuasive enough to prompt New York police to reopen the investigation.

Though “No point is omitted,” as Poe assured, the writer’s confidence and promise of comprehensiveness were not enough to secure commitment from his desired publishing outlets, and so the story ended up being split into three installments and published with a magazine called Ladies’ Companion, a periodical Poe once ridiculed for its “ill-taste and humbuggery.” Still, Poe delved into the writing of “Marie Rogêt” with a passion, a purpose, and a culprit in mind — all couched, as publishing commenced, within a solid structure, handling “my design in a manner altogether novel in literature” and examining “each by each, the opinions and arguments of the press upon the subject, and show that this subject has been, hitherto, unapproached.”

But life is what happens when you’re busy pitching other plot proposals. A sudden and unexpected, but ultimately valid, deathbed confession from an innkeeper claimed that Mary Rogers had perished from a botched abortion at her backroom business, with her sons disposing of the body. Without corrective measures taken with the popularly-received "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" — and quickly — the last installment was sure to be an embarrassment to Poe, and a blow to his reputation. As Stashower recounts in The Beautiful Cigar Girl’s most riveting chapters, the almost panic-stricken writer took a risk and attempted to salvage his against-a-deadline story with a distinctive revision in which the artist and opportunist merged, or, as Stashower puts it, where

Both aspects of Poe’s character, the genius and the charlatan, came into play as he grappled with “Marie Rogêt.” At times Poe veered from one to the other within the space of a single sentence, with extraordinary flashes of inspiration set off by an equal measure of guile. The result was a unique form of alchemy, transforming fact into fiction and back again. For Poe, Mary Rogers marked the point at which life and art converged.

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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