The Beautiful Cigar Girl

One summer day in 1841 a young woman named Mary Rogers told her fiance that she was going to pay a call on her aunt. She never returned. A few days later she was found floating in the Hudson River, and a coroner determined she died by strangulation. Rogers was something of a celebrity--attractive young women of that time period were employed by tobacco shops as clerks to get the male trade, sort of like the Hooters girls of their time. The many newspapers in New York had a field day speculating on who did it and calling for a reform of the judicial system.

At the same time, a young writer named Edgar Poe was struggling to make a name for himself. All through his life he had been battling some demon or another. Orphaned at a very young age, he was brought up by foster parents, and during his teen and young adult years he and his foster father became further estranged. He spent most of his life in poverty and alcoholism, and his barbed criticism had made many enemies in the literary set. He was deeply in love with his wife, a first cousin whom he married when she was thirteen, and who would die young from tuberculosis.

Poe drifted from one editorial job to another, hoping to start his own literary magazine, while working on a theory he called "ratiocination," which dealt with solving crimes through a series of deductions. He created a ficitional Parisian detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who had already appeared in one story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which had met with some acclaim. The murder of Mary Rogers inspired Poe to write a second story using Dupin, in which he would attempt to solve the crime in his fiction.

This is the subject matter of Daniel Stashower's The Beautiful Cigar Girl. This book excels both as a well-researched document of history and as a page-turning mystery, especially those unfamiliar to the case. He begins with a brief biography of Mary that leads up to her death, and then alternates her story with that of Poe's. There have been longer and more thorough biographies of Poe, but I thought Stashower did a fine job of letting us know the man behind the legend in just a few chapters. Also, he brings vividly to life the New York City (as well as Hoboken, New Jersey, where Mary's body came ashore) of the time. The wars between newspapers, the almost complete lawlessness of the streets (some of this overlaps with Gangs of New York) the various levels of society, and the geography, which to those who New York today can seem preposterous (Poe for a time lived at Broadway and 84th Street, which at that time was in the middle of acres of farmland).

The story Poe wrote based on Mary's case was The Mystery of Marie Roget, which is today one of his greatest works, and with the other two Dupin stories (Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter) created almost from whole cloth the genre we know today as the detective story. Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes owed a tremendous debt to Poe's Dupin, and Doyle was not hesitant to admit it. As we read about Poe's declining years (he died in 1849, at the age of 40) one can't help feel a great sorrow. He was never appreciated in his lifetime, either in reputation or financially (The Raven was very well-known in his day, and was acclaimed as the greatest American poem upon its publication, but he earned a total of nine dollars for it). The French resurrected his reputation and led to his posthumous place in the pantheon of American writers.

As for Mary, when it is revealed how she really died (though she died over a hundred and sixty years ago I don't want to spoil it here) it has resonance in our society today. She was among many girls who died the same way, but her name has become a footnote in literary history.