Mystery At The Blue Sea Cottage: A True Story of Murder in San Diego's Jazz Age

by James Stewart

Overview

Set in Jazz Age San Diego against the backdrop of yellow journalism, notorious Hollywood scandals, Prohibition corruption and a lively culture war, Mystery At The Blue Sea Cottage tells the intriguing true crime story of a beautiful dancer, a playboy actor, and a debonair doctor.

In January 1923, 20-year-old Fritzie Mann left home for a remote cottage by the sea to meet a man whose identity she had revealed to no one. The next morning, the barely clad body of the beautiful and bewitching dancer washed up on lonely Torrey Pines beach, her party dress and possessions strewn about on the sand.

The scene baffled investigators. Was it suicide, murder, or an accidental drowning? A botched autopsy created more questions than it answered. However, the investigation revealed a scandalous secret and, possibly, a powerful motive for murder.

After a suspect was arrested and charged with murder, an ambitious district attorney battled a high-profile L.A. private counsel in the most sensational trial in San Diego's history that was followed avidly across the nation. The big question: What really happened at the Blue Sea Cottage?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952225789
Publisher:	WildBlue Press
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	302
Sales rank:	1,027,025
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.63(d)

Editorial Reviews

★ 2021-12-21
In this debut nonfiction work, Stewart investigates the circumstances surrounding the murder of a 20-year-old dancer in Jazz Age Southern California.

Frieda “Fritzie” Mann didn’t get to experience much of the Roaring ’20s. In January 1923, the 20-year-old dancer was found dead on Torrey Pines State Beach a few miles north of San Diego. The case isn’t as well known as other contemporaneous Hollywood-connected scandals, like silent film star’s Fatty Arbuckle’s arrest. Stewart uses trial transcripts, newspaper articles, and other primary sources to bring Mann—and the rapidly changing times in which she lived—alive in a fast-paced, thoughtful true-crime work that contextualizes the dancer’s demise within the sociocultural climate of Prohibition-era America. “The story of Fritzie’s tragic death was much more than an intriguing Jazz Age murder mystery; in many ways, it defined one of the most fascinating eras in U.S. history,” he writes. At the time, Stewart reports, San Diego was “a backwater and Fritzie Mann wasn’t famous,” but in an age of yellow journalism that would make today’s tabloids blanch, the media pounced on the case. Mann was the “right kind of victim, not just a young white woman, but a beautiful exotic dancer washed up dead in her teddies, who cavorted with Hollywood players and enjoyed assignations at beach cottages and got pregnant out of wedlock.” Louis Jacobs, a physician in the U.S. Public Health Service who had been dating Mann, was charged with the murder. He was acquitted after a trial in which the prosecution theorized that he killed Mann while attempting to perform an abortion on her in a beachside cottage. Stewart ably depicts how the case reflects “the status of women in a changing—and unchanging—society” in which, “despite the apparent wave of liberalism and sexual freedom, the Victorian era moral code and associated laws lingered.” Those laws included an almost complete ban on abortions, driving women to extremes to terminate their pregnancies. As America lurches toward overturning Roe v. Wade, Fritzie Mann’s death carries a haunting resonance.

Effectively shows how the relative liberalism of the Roaring ’20s collided with a lingering Victorian moral code.

Kirkus Reviews