Here is the beginning of the introduction of my good friend two-time Edgar-winner Daniel Stashower‘s new book, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder.

I had decided to have a piece about the Mary Rogers murder and how it inspired Poe’s second detective story today, and was looking for something in the public domain when I found out about Dan’s latest opus. Well, it’s not public domain, but this was too clearly an act of Providence not to take advantage of it. I wrote to Dan and asked his permission to print this excerpt, and as of this writing I haven’t yet heard from him, but I’m going ahead anyway, since anybody who reads what is reproduced below is going to want more and buy the book. —JLW

THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL

by Daniel Stashower

In June of 1842, Edgar Allan Poe took up his pen to broach a delicate subject with an old friend. “Have I offended you by any of my evil deeds?” he asked. “If so, how? Time was when you could spare a few minutes occasionally for communion with a friend.”

Poe’s correspondent, a magazine editor by the name of Joseph Evans Snodgrass, would have known only too well what was coming next. Once again, Poe would launch a tirade against the latest publisher or literary rival to have wronged him. This done, Poe would admit to finding himself in a state of “pecuniary embarrassment” with no work and few prospects, and would ask his old friend to offer some “very trifling aid” in the form of a loan.

Poe’s latest letter, Snodgrass noted with relief, marked a departure from the usual pattern. “I have a proposition to make,” he wrote. “You may remember a tale of mine published about a year ago . . . entitled the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ Its theme was the exercise of ingenuity in detecting a murderer. I am just now putting the concluding touch to a similar article, which I shall entitle ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’—a Sequel to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The story is based upon that of the real murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, which created so vast an excitement, some months ago, in New-York.”

Snodgrass needed no reminders of that vast excitement. Mary Rogers, who was widely known as “the beautiful cigar girl,” had been a figure of note on the streets of New York City. From her post behind the cigar counter of John Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium on lower Broadway, Mary Rogers had cast her spell over half the men in the city. Her famous “dark smile” was said to be as potent as cupid’s arrow. Admirers from all walks of life, from the Bowery to City Hall, came to bask in her presence. Some offered up poems to her beauty. Others spoke in carrying voices of their business triumphs, sometimes patting their wallets and casting sidelong glances in her direction. All the while the cigar girl stood prettily behind the counter, eyes cast downward, pretending not to hear. Sometimes she would flutter her fingers to her mouth, as if shocked by a coarse phrase, but the eyes were cool and knowing.

It was feared by some that Anderson’s impressionable young employee would come to grief in such rough company. The New York Morning Herald expressed an earnest desire that “something should be done instantly to remedy the great evil consequent upon very beautiful girls being placed in cigar and confectionery stores. Designing rich rascals drop into these places, buy cigars and sugar plums, gossip with the girl and ultimately affect her ruin.”

These fears proved tragically prophetic. In July of 1841 Mary Rogers was found brutally murdered, sparking a massive public outcry and setting the stage for one of the most harrowing public dramas of the nineteenth century. driving one man to suicide, another to madness, and a third to public disgrace and humiliation. The death of the cigar girl, wrote one New Yorker, marked the “terrible moment when the city lost its innocence.”

For good or ill, the crime also became a catalyst for sweeping change. The city’s unregulated and disjointed police force proved unable to mount an effective investigation, prompting an ambitious slate of social and political reforms, even as the prurient details of the murder gave fuel to a furious newspaper circulation war, pushing American journalism into previously unimagined realms of sensationalism. The wily James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald seized on the case as a “grim cautionary tale,” giving himself a pretext to linger over the more lurid aspects of the case, and sparking a ferocious debate over the limits of journalistic propriety. “We cannot have the blood of murdered innocents served up to us at breakfast,” declared one outraged reader. “Have the gentlemen of the press no shame?” The plea for restraint went unheard: the drama of Mary Rogers would be one of the earliest and most significant murder cases to play out in the pages of the American press, laying the groundwork for every “crime of the century” to follow, from Lizzie Borden’s murders in 1892 to the murder of Stanford White in 1906, through the present day.

From the first. however, false leads and misconceptions dogged the case. In the days following the discovery of the body, it was widely assumed that Mary Rogers had fallen prey to one of the notorious “gangs of New York,” such as the Plug-Uglies or the Hudson Dusters, who ran riot through the streets, apparently reveling in the complete absence of any effective police authority “Must we yield our streets to these villains?” railed the New York Tribune. “Can we not call upon our elected officials to bring law upon the lawless?” The newspapers were eager to create a martyr. “In one emphatic word,” declared the Herald, “New York is disgraced and dishonored in the eyes of the civilized world, unless one great, one big, one strong moral movement be made to reform and reinvigorate the administration of criminal justice, and to protect the lives and property of its inhabitants from public violence and public robbery. Who will make the first move in this truly great moral reform?”

As the public’s indignation grew, Mary Rogers achieved the dubious distinction of becoming a bankable commodity. Within two weeks of the murder, a daguerrotypist had procured an engraving and struck a huge number of copies, said to he a “correct likeness” of the dead woman. “A peddler might sell a great number by taking them to Hoboken,” he declared in an advertisement for his wares, “where so many people are visiting the spot daily.” Pamphleteers also got into the act; a lurid account entitled The Dark Deed sold for six cents and recounted “several attempts of courtship and seduction brought about by her manifold charms.” A potboiler novel called The Beautiful Cigar Girl would soon follow.

One year later. however, the crime remained unsolved, leaving lives ruined and reputations shattered. As public interest began to wane, Edgar Allan Poe saw a unique opportunity. His plan, as he told his friend Snodgrass, was to take up the case in a manner that had never been attempted, or even imagined. Through the lens of fiction, he would study the facts of the case, expose the weaknesses and false assumptions of the official inquiry, and offer his own conclusions as to what had occurred—even pointing a finger at the likely villain. In short, Poe suggested, he would lay out a solution that could well force the New York police to reopen their investigation.

It was an astonishing gambit. At the time of the murder, Poe had been enjoying a rare interlude of prosperity as an editor of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, an illustrated monthly journal. He had followed the details of the Mary Rogers case with great care, and is even said to have been a patron of Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium, where the cigar girl had worked. Poe’s tenure at Graham’s marked a brief period of calm in an otherwise turbulent career. In spite of his obvious gifts as a poet and short story writer, Poe had a constant struggle to cobble together a living and was often reduced to begging for loans from sympathetic friends such as Snodgrass. Whatever small reputation he enjoyed rested chiefly on his work as a literary critic, a field in which he displayed great sensitivity and insight, but also a ruthlessness that earned him many enemies. Much of Poe’s greatest work had already been written at the time of the cigar girl’s death, but fame and creative freedom continued to elude him. “I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for thyself a miserable pittance),” he wrote, “but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves.”

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” he hoped, would change all that. Poe’s groundbreaking story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which introduced the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, had appeared in Graham’s in April 1841, about two months before the Mary Rogers murder. Poe presented Dupin as a reclusive, brilliant figure, shuttered away in his dimly lit chamber, venturing out only at night to prowl the streets of Paris and enjoy the “infinity of mental excitement” afforded by his powers of observation. The story anticipated virtually every convention of what would become the modern mystery story—the brooding, eccentric sleuth; the comparatively dense sidekick; the wrongfully accused suspect; the unlikely villain; the false clue; and—perhaps above all—the impossible, locked-room crime. Today the story stands as a literary milestone—the genesis of tire entire crure fiction genre—but its original publication drew only scant notice. By the following year Poe had left Graham’s and his fortunes had taken a precipitous downward turn. Casting about for an idea he could sell, Poe decided to apply Dupin’s powers of “ratiocination,” or deductive reasoning, to a real-life puzzle, transforming the murder of Mary Rogers into “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”