Infamous murder, famous author

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THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL: MARY ROGERS, EDGAR ALLAN POE, AND THE INVENTION OF MURDER

By Daniel Stashower

Dutton Adult, $25.95, 336 pages

REVIEWED BY GARY ANDERSON

Before there was Arthur Conan Doyle, before there was Ellery Queen, there was Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is now mostly remembered now as the father of the American horror story, but he was also a first-rate mystery writer and probably popularized the genre worldwide, setting the scene for everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Matlock.

"The Beautiful Cigar Girl" traces his development as a writer of mysteries as he tried to solve the real-life "crime of the early 19th century"; that being the brutal slaying of Mary Rogers, the Beautiful Cigar Girl, in New York in 1841.

Mary's decomposing and abused corpse was dragged out of the Hudson River in the summer of that year on the Jersey side of the waterway, setting off a criminal investigation that was never fully closed. She was the JonBenet Ramsey of her day. The authorities questioned many suspects, all of whom eventually came up with pat alibis. The case was never formally solved, but when the most plausible scenario arose, it was worthy of a great detective story.

Mary's death might have passed unnoticed in the violent days of the infamous gangs of New York had she not been a minor celebrity before her death. She was the main attraction at what was becoming the most widely patronized cigar store in New York and her beauty reportedly doubled and perhaps even tripled the store's clientele. Her death, and the inept handling of the case by what passed as the New York Police, actually helped to launch the reforms that would make the NYPD one of the great metropolitan police forces in the world today.

It is hardly surprising that Poe, a rising author and poet who specialized in mysteries, should join in the search for a solution to the case. Poe had actually gained some renown for addressing real-life puzzles. Early in his career, he exposed the real secret behind a chess-playing robot that was an early 19th-century attraction on the carnival circuit. Like his alter ego, the French detective C. Auguste Dupin, reportedly the prototype for Holmes, Poe was an armchair detective who preferred to piece together his crime puzzles from reading newspaper accounts.