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The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder (2006)

por Daniel Stashower

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaConversaciones / Menciones
6742633,955 (3.5)1 / 40
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 Rogt."… (más)
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Mostrando 1-5 de 26 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
An interesting look at Poe's life through the medium of one particular piece ( )
  cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |
I love these deep dives into, well in this case, New York City: a time when no bridges crossed the Hudson and there were no detectives. Gangs of hoodlums would surprise the sleeping policeman - the only one on duty in the city at night- knock over his little round guard shack and roll it down the street. Wholesome fun in more innocent times. Turns out the hoodlums didn't murder the beautiful cigar girl either. ( )
  JoeHamilton | Jul 21, 2020 |
Two books about notorious New York murder cases: Daniel Stashower’s about Mary Rogers’ (The Beautiful Cigar Girl) and Paula Uruburu’s about Stanford White (American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century).

Mary Rogers’ death was a mystery; in fact, protoconspiracy-theorists claimed that despite identification by her mother and one of her suitors the body found floating in the Hudson on July 28 1841 wasn’t Mary Rogers at all. It was a hot day in New York City and several young men seeking temperature relief by strolling along the Jersey side spotted the object, borrowed a boat, lassoed it around the neck, towed it to shore, and, being unwilling to touch the thing, tethered it to a handy rock. A floating corpse was a novelty, and the curious showed up to poke it with sticks and comment on its appearance. Someone worked up enough courage to wade into the river and drag it ashore, and someone else peered between the legs and made rude comments to his friends. Albert Crommelin had been searching for his missing romantic interest for several days and feared the worst when he spotted the tangle of bystanders; sure enough, he identified the thing as Mary Rogers.

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Stanford White’s death was no mystery at all. It was a hot night in New York City and with many others he was seeking temperature relief attending the opening night of a musical comedy presented in the rooftop theater at Madison Square Garden (which he had designed). Millionaire and major loon Harry Thaw, attending the same performance, left his table, walked up behind White, and shot him three times in the back of the head. There were hundreds of witnesses, including actresses and chorus girls, theater patrons, and Thaw’s wife Evelyn. Unlike Ms. Rogers, there was no doubt who the victim was – although his face was no longer recognizable.

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Author Daniel Stashower turns Mary Rogers’ story into a history of 1840s NYC police practices, the newspaper business, and an excellent biography of Edgar Allan Poe. Those of us used to CSI will find 1840 police procedure a little disconcerting; the police were abysmally corrupt and most murder investigation was in the hands of judges and coroners. The Mary Rogers case was a godsend to the newspaper business; editorials lambasted the police, the mayor, the governor, the coroner, and each other. (William Gordon Bennett enthusiastically drubbed his competitors in the editorial pages of the New York Herald; New York Sun editor Moses Beach “had no more brains than an oyster and the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley was less effective than “a large New England squash”). In the absence of any sort of police force, the newspapers took on the investigator role themselves and cheerfully accused just about everybody in the city, plus a good fraction of New Jersey. Poe comes into the picture because in his usual financial desperation he adapted the Mary Rogers story for the second of his C. Auguste Dupin detective mysteries, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.

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Paula Uruburu concentrates on the title heroine, and Ms Uruburu is unhesitant in sympathizing with Ms. Nesbit (well, although I’m just a little suspicious of her veracity, I’m pretty sympathetic with Evelyn, too). Evelyn Nesbit lost her comfortable middle-class life when her father died, and quickly found herself supporting her family as an underage chorus girl and artist’s model (her mother was concerned, but took the money). Her Gibson-girl beauty attracted the attention of Stanford White, who had a reputation for this sort of thing (White is supposed to have coined the expression “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” and invented the concept of having a girl jump out of a cake at a party (well, it was actually a pie, which in addition to four-and-twenty blackbirds contained a 14-year-old girl dressed in a blackbird hat and feathered toe rings)).

After some beating around the bush the 40ish White drugged and raped the 16-year-old Evelyn (there’s some question of how naïve Evelyn was. Uruburu glosses over it, but even in more innocent times you might expect that a girl from a theater background would realize that invitations to a much older man’s apartment to pose for lingerie art would eventually end badly). She acquiesced to the arrangement; Mom kept taking the money.

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Mary Rogers’ case was never solved. The evidence was hopelessly muddled; however, the best guess is that rather than being gang-raped and beaten to death as originally supposed, she died during a failed abortion and was beaten up and dumped in the Hudson post-mortem. The abortion theory caused major problems for Poe; he had promised that he would reveal the murderer in Marie Rogêt and had published two of three serializations when evidence for an abortion emerged. He had to quickly rewrite the final chapter.

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Stanford White eventually grew tired of Evelyn and moved on to other chorus girls. By now, however, Evelyn had attracted the attention of Harry Thaw, a Pittsburgh steel millionaire (or more correctly, the spoiled son of the widow of a Pittsburgh steel millionaire). Stanford White was a statutory rapist, but Thaw was a real piece of work. Already notorious for hiring ladies of the evening for whipping sessions (he did the whipping), he persuaded Evelyn and her mother to go on a European tour (interrupted briefly when Thaw whipped a bellboy in a London hotel). Mrs. Nesbit left her daughter in the middle of the trip and Evelyn found herself alone with Harry in (nope, not kidding, really this Gothic) a deserted German castle Harry had rented for a week. Harry persuaded Evelyn to tell her the story of her affair with White, and latter that evening forced open the door of her room, naked and carrying a riding crop. He spent several hours of admonishing Evelyn for her misbehavior, which left her so covered with lash marks that she couldn’t lie down for fear of the bedclothes sticking to the bloody cuts. Rather surprisingly, when the couple returned to the US Evelyn agreed to marry Thaw.

Thaw, however, couldn’t get over the fact that White had Evelyn first – he took Evelyn to his dentist and had all the dental work White had paid for removed and replaced. That wasn’t quite enough to satisfy him – hence the Madison Square Garden shooting. Thaw was utterly convinced that he would be found innocent – and was outraged when his family bought him a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict. Once she had testified – pretty convincingly – that Thaw really was a nutcase, the Thaws immediately dumped Evelyn without a cent. (After getting out of the asylum the first time, Harry Thaw was picked up and committed again for another bellboy whipping incident; in fact, he spent more time in custody for whipping bellboys then did for shooting Stanford White).s She spent the rest of her life in a series of increasingly dreary nightclub and cabaret shows (although briefly regaining some notoriety as a consultant for The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, where she’s played by Joan Collins, and, of course, posthumous recognition in Ragtime, this time played by Elizabeth McGovern).

I liked both of these – Stashower’s evocation of 1840s New York is compelling, as is the biographical material on Poe. I confess when I first picked it up I had Mary Rogers confused with Helen Jewett, another New York cause célèbre murder victim. Miss Jewett didn’t sell cigars, however). As far as Evelyn Nesbit goes, perhaps Uruburu takes a little too much of Nesbit’s testimony at face value. But it’s pretty clear that even if Evelyn stretched the truth a little what demonstrably happened to her was pretty grim. Besides, I’ve always had a weakness for Gibson girls. ( )
  setnahkt | Jan 1, 2018 |
An excellent read that will keep you up all night trying to finish it!

http://nicolewbrown.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-beautiful-cigar-girl-mary-rogers.ht...

The proprietor…preferred to deal with “readers of serious intent” rather than common browsers, and it was known in the neighborhood that “freedom of Gowan’s bookstore was not presented to every passer-by”. The chosen few who gained admittance found a massive but haphazard inventory, ranging from rare texts on Greek horology and Roman funerary practices to the latest European novels. Gowans opened the shop in January of 1837 and soon filled the floor-to-ceiling oak plank shelves to capacity. As additional volumes accumulated they were stored first in wooden crates stacked on a pair of battered deal tables, then on chairs scavenged from a previous tenant, and finally in teetering stacks on the floor. The impressive created, recalled one early visitor, was that of a “Minotaur maze of books.”
--Daniel Stashhower (The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Invention of Murder p 31)
“I think,” Poe once wrote… “that I have already had my share of trouble for one so young.” It was once of the few occasions where he might have been accused of understatement
-- Daniel Stashhower (The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Invention of Murder p 34)
…Edgar and his newborn sister spent much of their time in the care of nursemaids, one of whom, according to a family friend, “fed them liberally with bread soaked in gin” and “freely administered…other spirituous liquors, with sometimes laudanum.” This, the nurse believed, would “make them strong and healthy.”
-- Daniel Stashhower (The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Invention of Murder p 35) ( )
  nicolewbrown | Oct 17, 2016 |
Too much unnecessary information made this book quite tedious at times. I skipped over many a page to get to the interesting parts. The story of Edgar Allen Poe is really well done and his subsequent downfall with the story of Mary Roger's murder. The part about the murder needs some MAJOR editing. Ugh.... so much dragged out information. There are some great parts but they are overshadowed by the drivel of TMI. Had high hopes for this book, but it did not live up to that. ( )
  bnbookgirl | Dec 19, 2015 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 26 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
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"Oh, Maria!  Would to God you had reflected ere you had taken this step!"
- (The cover of a novel published in 1844, based on the Mary Rogers case.)
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For Miss Corbett.  We'll always have Breezewood.
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In June of 1842, Edgar Allan Poe took up his pen to broach a delicate subject with an old friend.
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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 Rogt."

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