|
|
Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 40 |
|
Stashower's new book
rides crest of Poe wave
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
We seem to be in the midst of a remarkable new boom of interest in the founder of the detective story, 19th century American author Edgar Allan Poe, with a wave of new novels about Poe--at least three that I know of--and a fascinating new non-fiction book that's getting rave reviews: Daniel Stashower's "The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and The Invention of Murder" (Dutton, $25.95).
I guess I'm even doing my little part because Poe plays a major role in the first hour of "Dark Corridors: The Curious History of Mystery," the three-hour TV documentary I'm writing and hope to produce for PBS with my business partner, filmmaker Danny McGuire, sof California's Spirit Productions.
Oddly enough, Danny and I already have videotaped an interview with author Stashower for "Dark Corridors," in which he serves as our expert "witness" on the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was inspired by Poe's detective stories to create the most famous detective of all time: Sherlock Holmes.
Stashower is both a novelist and a mystery historian. That helped make his "Teller of Tales," a biography of Conan Doyle, one of the most compelling non-fiction books I've ever read. He's able to tell his factual stories as if they were fast-moving suspense novels, which sets them way apart from the run of the mill academic history books. His scholarship is also exceptional, which I'm sure is why "Teller of Tales" was honored with both the Edgar and the Agatha awards, two of the most respected honors in the mystery genre.
His new book delves deeply into one of the abiding literary mysteries of the history of mystery: The true story behind Poe's second of three stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, the first detective hero in literature, who first was introduced in Poe's 1841 short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
That second story--"The Mystery of Marie Roget"--set a number of precedents for the mystery genre, just as "Rue Morgue" did the year before. Poe based it on an actual unsolved mystery--the 1841 murder of Mary Rogers, a beautiful 20-year-old salesgirl at a popular cigar store in New York City--and gave his fictional detective the job of solving the murder the police couldn't solve.
This was a daring plan because the public had been aroused to a fever pitch by the penny dreadful papers of 1840s New York, which had taken up the case of the dazzling young lady that men flocked to see selling cigars over the counter at Anderson's Tobacco Emporium on Broadway. Her body had been found, badly beaten and floating in the river, apparently the victim of a man or men who strangled her. The newspapers had milked the case for all they could get out of it, leaving Poe's Dupin with some rather dubious "facts" and theories to sort through.
Poe also gave Dupin a terrible second challenge: Dupin would try to solve the case without ever visiting the crime scene or interviewing witnesses. By making Dupin into what later became known as "an armchair detective," Poe was setting the stage for scores of sleuths to come, including the phenomenally popular Nero Wolfe.
Stashower first presents us with all the available details about the real Mary Rogers and her death, culled from all the newspaper coverage of the day, some of it quite sensational, and all the surviving testimony from the various public sessions that dealt with the case. Then he shows how the financially desperate, debt-ridden and alcoholic Poe challenged most of the well-publicized theories about the case and came up with his own very bold and logical solution to the mystery.
(When Poe first created the Dupin character, there were no official police detective bureaus in America. He was greatly influenced by the writings of Francois Eugene Vidocq, the former criminal who founded the Paris Surete, the world's first police detective bureau. That's why Poe's sleuth, Dupin, is a Frenchman working in France and why Mary Rogers became Marie Roget, a French rather than American murder victim.)
Poe's story was so long, Stashower explains, that it had to be published in three parts by the magazine that bought the story, The Ladies Companion. Unfortunately for Poe, some astonishing new evidence involving the Rogers case came to light after the first two sections of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" already had been published. Panicked, Poe suddenly had to come up with last minute revisions to the story just before the deadline for printing the third installment in order to save Dupin's reputation as a sleuth--and his own as a writer of popular mystery tales.
In this fast-paced book, Stashower not only gives us a very thoughtful analysis of the actual murder case, but also an ongoing portrait of the rapidly-declining Poe, whose personal life was in chaos, his writing career in jeopardy and his own death quite near. (Poe died at age 40, just seven years after writing the story.)
Though eclipsed in fame by "Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe's second Dupin detective story has retained its mystique largely because of the care he took to link it to the famous American crime case. The only significant film version of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" was made by Unversal in 1942, exactly a century after the story first was published. It's an abysmal film with little kinship to the original story.
I think readers really will enjoy "The Beautiful Cigar Girl" for all the many insights Stashower brings to the subject, including a very interesting analysis of what newspaper coverage was like in that era, how corrupt and inefficient law enforcement was at the same time and how badly the public needed a real crime-solver like Dupin to get to the bottom of things.
©2006 by Ron Miller. The illustration is courtesy of Dutton. This column first posted Dec. 4, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|