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New York City in the 1840s was an unruly place (well, when was it not?) but not so anarchic that the murder of Mary Rogers, 'The Beautiful Cigar Girl', did not cause a sensation. The young woman in question disappeared one day, reappeared in a week or so, and then three years later disappeared for good, or at least until her badly decomposed body was retrieved from the Hudson River. How she came to meet her end has never been established, but her story provided the basis for Poe's tale of ratiocination, 'The Mystery of Marie Roget', and it is this connection that provides the basis for Joel Rose's florid representation of Old New York. Mary Rogers' murder was not the only sensation of those years. There was the (real) case of John Colt, brother of Samuel of Colt revolver fame, who killed and mutilated his publisher, Samuel Adams, and was sentenced to hang for it and the (probably fictional) Tommy Coleman, convicted of killing his wife, her paramour, and his baby daughter. Both of these gentlemen were in the Tombs awaiting execution when the building went on fire, perhaps providing cover for the escape of both murderers. Charged with investigating all this is (the real) Jacob Hays, High Constable of New York City, who has spent a good 40 years of his life trying to impose some sort of order on a city always teetering on the verge of disaster. He is aided by his (presumably fictional) daughter Olga, presented as an unusually broad-minded young woman, who seems to accept irregular sexual liaisons and their consequential abortions with equanimity. She also enjoys a remarkable freedom of movement in a very dangerous city. The very best historical fiction, it seems to me, tries to provide the reader with an imaginative reconstruction of the emotional, subjective, even sensual experience of the past. It's best if the factual details are correct, of course, but it is that sense of 'thereness' that can obliterate the distance between us and those who went before us that is the real justification for choosing to write historical fiction rather than straight history. Joel Rose does not share this notion of history. To him, evidently, the past is a foreign country where everyone was slightly nuts. They certainly do not speak a recognizable form of vernacular English; rather they declaim at the top of their lungs, using a convoluted and imprecise vocabulary never heard on land or sea. Worse, they are simultaneously seriously violent and terribly quaint. Consider the following: "Tommy had wanted a son, but he swore, his eyes misting, that the newborn Daughter of the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl was the most beautiful baby in the Five Points, and maybe on the face of the earth." To be quite clear – the Pretty Hot Corn Girl was the woman Tommy's brother murdered, her sister is Tommy's wife, and Tommy would go on to murder her and the Daughter. A little of that goes a long way; unfortunately, there's a lot of it. Rose also has at best an infirm grasp on his tense structure, which veers incomprehensibly from past to present and back for no evident reason. He has a bad habit of inserting 'factoids' when the book seems in danger of coming in under 400 pages – a list of the richest men in New York, how to get from Baltimore to Gotham – and of using peculiar spellings (rhum', 'segar', 'kerrect') in descriptive passages. But all this pales in comparison with the failures of plot and characterization that move the book, slowly, in the direction of a limp conclusion. It's a pity, really, that the dead cannot sue for slander. Late last year, Daniel Stashower published a non-fiction work on the Mary Rogers case: THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL: MARY ROGERS, EDGAR ALLAN POE, AND THE INVENTION OF MURDER. I have not read it, but, judging from the reviews, it would clearly be the better place to turn for any reader wishing to learn something about Mary, her murder, and its connection to Poe.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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