Synopses & Reviews
A gruesome murder, a stunned city, and Edgar Allan Poe come to life with vivid detail in this shocking true story.
On July 28, 1841, the battered body of a young woman was found floating in the Hudson River. It was soon discovered to be the lovely Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar salesgirl who had gone missing three days earlier. By nightfall, news of the girl's death had spread and sent Manhattan into a spasm of horror and outrage.
In the months that followed, the gruesome details of the murder pushed American journalism into previously unimagined realms of lurid sensationalism. But despite media pressures, New York City's unregulated and disjointed police force proved unable to mount an effective investigation, and the crime remained unsolved.
A year after Mary Rogers was murdered, as public interest in the case began to wane, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case. At the time of the murder, thirty-one-year-old Poe had recently published his groundbreaking detective story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. A year later, however, his fortunes had taken a downward turn. Desperate for success, Poe sent his famous detective, C. Auguste Dupin, on the case of a lifetime: to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.
In The Beautiful Cigar Girl, Edgar Award-winning author Daniel Stashower deftly captures the drama and mystery of New York in the mid-nineteenth century, illuminating the spellbinding crime that transformed a city.
Review
"[An] intriguing story, one that sheds considerable light on the snares of a big city for a young woman." Booklist
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"[L]iterary buffs in particular will enjoy this wonderful backstory to the creation of Poe's sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Library Journal
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"Stashower knows murder, and he knows the craft of biography." Kirkus Reviews
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"Stashower has taken an interesting historical event in and of itself and used it as a lens to focus on so many of the recurrent themes in Poe's life....This well-written book will please fans of murder mysteries in general as well as those of Edgar Allan Poe." Providence Journal
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"Mr. Stashower, deftly interweaving contemporary press accounts of the murder and the investigation into his narrative, vividly recreates the atmosphere of the period in a moody, sepia-toned style..." William Grimes, The New York Times Book Review
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"Well-crafted and suspenseful....Daniel Stashower is a diddler. And in The Beautiful Cigar Girl he makes murder a beguilingly edifying and entertaining subject." Philadelphia Inquirer
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"Poe's audaciousness is at the heart of Stashower's engrossing book....Stashower turns some lovely phrases and unearths fascinating details..." Cleveland Plain Dealer
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"Stashower artfully weaves together a portrait of a self-immolating literary genius with the story of the beautiful, melancholy murder victim....Eminently readable and thick with research, The Beautiful Cigar Girl draws a rich portrait of mid-19th-century Manhattan..." The Boston Globe
Synopsis
Readers who flocked to Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City will love Stashower's true story of murder and media mania including the controversial involvement of Edgar Allan Poe in 1840s New York. Halftones throughout.
Synopsis
Daniel Stashower, the Edgar Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Arthur Conan Doyle biography Teller of Tales, delivers a gripping true story of murder and media mania including the controversial involvement of Edgar Allan Poe in 1840s New York. Halftone photos throughout.
About the Author
Daniel Stashower is the author of four mystery novels and a winner of the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.