ISSUE 22 - BOOK REVIEW

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Invention of Murder
By Daniel Stashower

The title of this book is a bit of a misnomer—it is not about the invention of murder, because Cain and Abel do not make an appearance. A murder however, does occur. The setting is 1840’s New York city, and its bounds were fillings it rudimentary seams. Immigrants were filling in not just from overseas, but from across the country.
Enter Mary Rogers. She comes from Connecticut with her wealthy widowed mother looking for a fresh start after the death of their primary breadwinner. Mary’s mother opens a boardinghouse and Mary finds employment at John Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium. She is the counter clerk, eye candy to complement the sweet cigars.
Mary becomes a recognized figure because she is the only woman ever in the cigar shop, and Anderson’s becomes the hangout for politicos and newspaper people. There are even a few odes to her printed in a few of the many papers of NYC, before she achieves her most famous and revered status as a dead woman that winds up on the shores of Hoboken.
Sensationalist journalism is also examined, and Stashower uses the record of the newspapers to both reconstruct the elements of the Mary Rogers murder, but also to examine its own being and effect. Stashower describes an atmosphere that is vaguely reminiscent of journalism in our current Internet age---ethic standards were lax, so the newspapers featured prominent rumors or gossip. Copyright laws were non-existent and newspapers routinely reprinted stories from Europe or other newspapers with no attribution.
But beyond this story, and in the same vein as Erik Larson’s modern genre-standard “Devil in the White City,” Stashower introduces another fascinating personality to complement the pretty girl tragedy: Edgar Allan Poe, the master of dark fictional trauma.
The startling thing about Poe is how little respected he was in his own lifetime, and especially his American literary contemporaries. It took European masters such as Dickens and Lord Tennyson to convince Americans about the wonderment of Poe’s works, after his death of course. Poe’s biographical story is filled with his own missed opportunities and blown chances. He was orphaned at a young age, then adopted into a wealthy family, but then wasted his privilege, which is a reoccurring part of Poe’s personal and professional life. Poe did write several stories that received some acclaim, but he died before the age of 50, barely having enough money to pay his bills.
Poe intersects with Rogers’ story, because he constructs a narrative to solve the bizarre case around his fictional French detective hero, Auguste Dupin. Poe’s answer to the mystery does not lead to the actual solution in the case, but brings light to previously ignored reasoning.
Stashower’s story compels because of the contrast in modern day perceptions of the stories of Rogers and Poe. Rogers, at the time was a fixture that added to the character of a local neighborhood who blossomed into sensational mystery and then faded into history. Poe was perceived as a normal, overly obsessive hack with no apparent value that went from ignored to admired after his death.
Stashower mentions at least three other high-profile murders in addition to the Rogers case. It’s a reminder that voyeuristic interest in glitzy death is nothing new in modernity, that it’s always been an ingrained function of our humanity, or at least our American humanity. Also, the case of Poe proves again that artists are more appreciated after their death, even for someone whose work was widely known and accessible. But beyond the under appreciation of Poe in his own time, is that his own death is still unsolved, a fact that Stashower chooses to ignore, but would connect Poe and Rogers even more intricately. Poe’s mysterious death is given its own fictional detective in Matthew Pearl’s “The Poe Shadow.”
Stashower’s book dives deep into the seedier side of the American myth; our fascination with the macabre, our abuse but continual support of the free marketplace of ideas, and the artistic underdog will always be simultaneously mocked and adored. “The Beautiful Cigar Girl” shows the reflection of a forever young America—every time it looks in its past it realizes it is still in the same, sad shape.

-Josh Spilker