The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

by Daniel Stashower Narrated by Matt Weisgerber

Overview

On July 28, 1841, the body of Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar girl, was found floating in the Hudson-and New York's unregulated police force proved incapable of solving the crime. One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt."

Editorial Reviews

In several senses, the 1841 killing of Mary Rogers was America's first great media murder. When the former Manhattan "cigar girl" was found floating in the Hudson River in July, she was already renowned throughout the city for her beauty and for a previous unexplained disappearance. But in the tabloid fever of penny newspaper wars, her posthumous fame swept the nation. To capitalize on the frenzy, struggling writer Edgar Allan Poe constructed "The Mystery of Marie Roget," a thinly veiled fiction based on the case. In The Beautiful Cigar Girl, Edgar winner Daniel Stashower artfully interweaves the almost equally tragic stories of a doomed young woman and a deeply troubled genius.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Stashower deftly combines his talents as a novelist, mystery writer and biographer in The Beautiful Cigar Girl.
— The Washington Post

William Grimes

Mr. Stashower, a mystery writer and the author of Teller of Tales, a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, captures both the pathos and the absurdity of Poe’s often self-imposed predicaments. There was no opportunity, no matter how golden, that Poe could not subvert and no benefactor or potential ally he could not pick a fight with.
— The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

An informative, swift-moving account of how Edgar Allan Poe transformed a sensational 1841 New York City murder into "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (published in three installments in the winter of 1842-3). Stashower knows murder, and he knows the craft of biography. He has written mystery novels (Elephants in the Distance, 1989) and an Edgar-winning life of Arthur Conan Doyle (Teller of Tales, 1999) and brings to this current, complex task both considerable intelligence and wide-ranging research (he scoured Poe scholarship, 19th-century newsA bold attempt to understand a tormented genius, to examine a grisly crime and to explain the latter's effects both on Gotham's system of law enforcement and on abortion legislation.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159372956
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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