The Beautiful Cigar Girl

Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

Plot

Murder in the city casts a peculiar spell, a mixture of horror, fascination and relief. One more member of the herd has been picked off, but it was somebody else who attracted the invisible, anonymous hand that could strike anyone at any time. When the victim is a beautiful woman, sex enters the equation, and you have front-page news. That was certainly the case in the summer of 1841, when Mary Rogers, a young saleswoman at John Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium on Lower Broadway in Manhattan, disappeared and turned up a few days later floating in the Hudson River. Her baffling murder, a sensation at the time, attracted the attention not only of the city’s fire-breathing newspaper editors, but also of Edgar Allan Poe, who assigned his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the crime. Their converging stories are the twin strands that Daniel Stashower neatly ties together in "The Beautiful Cigar Girl: May Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder", his atmospheric, suspenseful re-creation of a crime, a city and a writer as doomed as the victim he wrote about.