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The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder By Daniel Stashower ( Dutton Adult )
Release Date: 2006-10-05
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Product Description
Readers who flocked to Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City will love award-winning author Daniel Stashower's true story of murder and media manipulation- including the controversial involvement of Edgar Allan Poe-in 1840s New York.
Unabridged CDs - 10 CDs, 12 hours
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 neither fish nor fowl
author pursued two story lines and really did justice to neither. as an earlier review states, there was no real solution to the murder mystery. I learned quite a bit about Poe(he could have not invented a more tragic character than himself), but might have done so more easily by picking up a biography. Whether I would have done so is another story, so maybe Stashower achieved something here. still feel larson is more successful in weaving together two plots.
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When fact and fiction collide
An interesting book about the intersection of two lives: Mary Rogers, a popular local girl in 19th century New York who died under mysterious circumstances and Edgar Allan Poe who fictionalized Mary's story and used his literary prowess to try and clear up the questions surrounding her death. In all honesty, the most interesting bits of this book were the parts that focused exclusively on the Mary Rogers case itself. It is a very bizarre and unique true-crime story with all sorts of interesting suspects and unusual evidence. The sections of the book that focus on Poe are interesting, but somewhat detract from the Mary Rogers story. Mainly because Poe's take on the Mary Rogers case was so terribly convoluted and seemed to suffer a great deal under the weight of his enormous ego. But there is quite a bit of biographical material on Poe that sheds some light into his personality. All-in-all, it's an OK book and worth a read if you've never heard of the Mary Rogers case.
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 Murdered, or Victim of a Botched Abortion? ( jconradguest )
When I purchased The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, I was expecting something more along the line of The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl; that is historical fiction - fictional characters set against the backdrop of an historical story and setting.
The Beautiful Cigar Girl is Daniel Stashower's (Teller of Tales) attempt to recount the story of Mary Rogers, a Manhattan tobacco store clerk whose mutilated corpse was discovered afloat in the Hudson River in the summer of 1841. Her death fueled a newspaper war and served as the basis for The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, a magazine serial by Edgar Allan Poe featuring C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared as the detective who used "ratiocination" to solve the mystery in Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue. In his story, Poe rightly deduced that Marie, her demise modeled after Mary Rogers', wasn't a victim of gang violence, as the press and police believed. However, as evidence was discovered that Rogers may have instead died of a botched abortion, he had to amend his final installment to keep his reputation from being tarnished.
Stashower doesn't attempt to solve the still unsolved mystery of Mary Rogers' murder - we likely will never know the truth - but instead endeavors to recount the events surrounding her demise as well as the efforts to track down the perpetrator, or perpetrator's, Poe's own fascination with the murder, and the uncanny parallels of Poe's and Rogers' lives.
In an age prior to pin-up girls, striptease or pornography, Mary is depicted as perhaps America's first sex symbol - as the Herald newspaper wrote, "Mary Rogers's face was well known to all young men about town." A popular T.V. show recently put forth: "We will never view women as equals until we view them as equals in death (a reference to women dying on the battlefield), and so Stashower succeeds in portraying the sensationalism Miss Roger's death caused. Certainly had she been a he, her death would not have caused the stir it did, the story reaching as far as Philadelphia and Baltimore - both cities in which Poe resided. Yet many of the details of Mary's life amount to conjecture and hearsay in comparison to what is commonly known of Poe's self-destructive abuse of the bottle, poverty, love life and rants against publishers and fellow writers of the period. The title is misleading, as The Beautiful Cigar Girl - particularly in the final third, perhaps the result of Poe's greater celebrity - reads more like a biography of his life. It was only as I neared the conclusion of The Beautiful Cigar Girl that I came to understand the "and the Invention of Murder" portion of the title as Poe having given birth to the modern detective story.
Stashower shows Poe as his own worst enemy. Despite his genius and a literary legacy that would go unrecognized until after his death at the age of 40, Poe forever portrayed himself a victim of lesser talents and those unable to recognize talent even as he continually sabotaged his own career.
If you're expecting fast-paced historical fiction, you may be disappointed. However, as an account of life in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century - including the birth of the tabloid, the many gangs that instilled fear in the local population, a nearly non-existent police force made up of volunteers, and an inept coroner - the mystery surrounding a grisly murder the likes of which had never before been seen (think Criminal Minds), and a biography of one of this country's greatest writers, I found The Beautiful Cigar Girl a fascinating read.
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 One girl goes missing and transforms history ( ctlpareader )
THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL is attention-holding social and literary history nimbly written by Daniel Stashower. It is the story of a real crime committed in July 1841 in or about New York City that transfixed the media of the day, challenged Edgar Allan Poe to put his detective fiction theories to the test and transformed New York before eventually fading away in the public consciousness a few decades later.
If there is something to be learned by the ubiquitous episodes of the "Law and Order" and "CSI" franchises, it is that a murder is never straightforward. Just like those shows, when the lovely, alluring yet innocent seeming Manhattan store clerk who worked in a popular smoke shop frequented by men of all walks of life goes missing and her body is later found washing up near a waterfront park in Hoboken, New Jersey, Pandora's box is opened. Circumstantial evidence suggests connections to the city's gang culture and abortionists. There is a revolving door of individual suspects, too, who may or may not have been the victim's swains. The police department is largely night watchmen and process servers prone to corruption and unequal to the task of fighting and detecting crime. Then the media steps in and it is hyped beyond belief. In Philadelphia, where he has taken umbrage after burning just about every personal and professional bridge in New York, Poe reads the newspaper accounts and realizes that his ever-present money problems and professional ambitions could be resolved by inserting the fictive detecting methods he created for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." He puts himself on the line, advertising that in his new story starring his detective Dupin, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," he will solve the puzzle.
To say more is to spoil this very real plot. I think Stashower does a fine job of balancing and interweaving the various strands of biography, social history, crime detection and the birth of detective fiction. He has a very direct but graceful way of writing and ordering his information. He evokes 19th century New York vividly. If you liked THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, then you should enjoy this. My only complaint, too small to demote the book a star, is that I wish the author were more explicit as to naming his sources when he quotes, for instance, "a writer of the day." There is a considerable bibliography at the end, but no idea which source gave up what information per se.
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Interesting but far from spectacular ( daveintx )
This book basically attempts to cover the sort of history/crime nonfiction that Erik Larsen mined so profitably in "Devil in the White City" and "Thunderstruck" (neither of which is quite as gripping as Larsen's non-crime-oriented "Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History.") But Daniel Stashower's effort to link a once-famed/now-forgotten crime and Edgar Allan Poe's career is, alas, only intermittently interesting.
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