Hi, I am Elle, and this is Quid Pro Quo. I am a true crime obsessed weirdo, but I'm not your run of the male true crime obsessed weirdo. I took my morbid teenage curiosity to the next level and made it legitimate with a master's degree in forensic psychology. I don't currently work in the field, but I do really miss it, so I'm using this podcast to talk about my observations and tackle whatever questions happen to come my way.
The Quid Pro Quo podcast deals with crime, psychology, and related themes. Listener discretion is advised. Happy Halloween and welcome to the Quid Pro Quo launch. Halloween has always been a special time for me, so I thought it would be fitting to start things off by discussing one of the people who started me on this lifelong fascination with the criminal mind, not other than Mr.
Edgar Allan Poe, the Grandmaster of Spooky. I have very, very vague memories of the first time I read Poe. I couldn't tell you exactly what age I was, but I was very young and impressionable, and still have the goth music collection to prove it. Our world is so saturated with crime media that it's hard to conceive of the time before true crime or detective stories, but that was the reality of the pre-Victorian world.
Edgar Allan Poe is widely considered to be the father of both the modern detective story and the true crime genre. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and generally acknowledged to be one of the primary champions of modern forensics and detective methodology, was a massive fan of Poe, and calls him the Supreme Original Short Story writer of all time. According to Conan Doyle, if every man who received a check for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Chi-ops. So today, what I'm going to talk about is what inspired Poe.
All of Poe's stories drew inspiration from well-known crimes of his time, but one of his stories, the mystery of Marie Rogier, is considered the first attempt to suggest a workable solution to a real crime by reconstructing it in fiction. There were other contemporary authors writing about crime, but they tended toward more of a tablet style. None had the reach, insight, or talent to make such a lasting impression, much less carve out a whole new genre. I started to dig around a bit on Mr.
Poe, and found the book, The Beautiful Cigar Girl, Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashour, which I immediately devoured. I definitely recommend this book to people with an interest in historical crime and or the nitty-gritty life details of Edgar Allan Poe. Stashour tells the story of the brilliant but abysmal life of Edgar Allan Poe and how his focus on one murder revolutionized an entire genre. While I already knew separately about both Poe and the case which inspired him to write Marie Rogier, this book did an amazing job of filling out both stories and connecting a lot of dots.
Stashour's writing style is a touch-formal, but it kind of has to be to meld with the voluminous amount of original mid-19th century material. Regardless, it was fast-moving, engaging, easy-to-read, informative, and punctuated with just the right amount of absurd humor to break up the tension, which you might have seen if you already follow me on Twitter. Even well before any hint of scandal, much less her infamous death, Mary Rogers was the very original It Girl. As one contemporary newspaperman commented, her notoriety is unencumbered by position or achievement.
She was, quite simply, the first woman to become famous for being famous. She was widely considered a paragon of beauty and grace, but for the social standards of her time, she was effectively a nobody. Her family had been involved in commercial shipping out of Connecticut and had lived in comfort during her childhood. But as a second marriage, her mother and the resultant children were not as high in the line of inheritance, and they lost much of their standing after her father's death.
They moved to New York for a new start, but work was hard to find, especially for a pair of women used to lives of relative leisure. And so in her late teens, Mary began working in a cigar store in southern Manhattan owned by John Anderson, a family friend and benefactor. This was a well-known gathering place and sort of salon for newsmen and literary types, and her celebrated beauty and demeanor in the presence of so much press made her a household name as the beautiful cigar girl. Po frequently visited New York and even lived in the area a bit during this time.
His attempts to ingratiate himself into the New York Literary Society meant he would have unquestionably at least known about and probably even met Mary. The US was in the full swing of a fairly puritanical era, even though it was a common practice in Europe, hiring a pretty hostess of good breeding to work among such men was a surprisingly controversial move. Some feared that she would be coursed by her exposure to so many men in a social environment, but her employer promised to shield her from harm and the patrons were so captivated by her dark, melancholy beauty, her grace and her sweet but somehow aloof poise that they became fiercely protective of her. She was reportedly paid handsomely, treated well, and the cigar shop business boomed.
She was fairly private and like many women in history we know very little of her inner world, but at the time this mystery only seemed to add to her allure. Her interactions with male customers were described as friendly but not flirtatious, and her day-to-day movements provided no end of newspaper fodder, both for her admirers and her employer's detractors. A brief disappearance in October 1838, accompanied by a suicide note, was the subject of so much press it catapulted her to a prototype of reality stardom. The newspapers went wild with speculation.
Was it a suicide attempt? Had she run away with an unknown lover? Was it a publicity stunt? Though her mother reported she was home the next day, many were suspicious of this information when she did not return to work for several weeks, and rumors of a secret romantic fling continued long after her return.
Some papers dismissed the incident as fiction and leveled accusations at her employer of a publicity hoax to rival those seen in the recent holdup of Kim Kardashian. While others claimed the disappearance must have been an illicit deliance of some sort, and the news of her immediate return was the real hoax. She claimed that she was only visiting friends, but the simplicity of her answer and refusal to discuss the note only seemed to create more gossip. Mary was reportedly so mortified by the increased attention at the cigar store when she returned to work that she fainted and had to be carried home.
She immediately quit, but Anderson begged her to return to work, and she did so, but only after receiving a substantial raise. Such jentile work was hard to find, and the obligations and pay at the store were unusually crucial, but it seems that this incident was Mary's limit. She stayed on for a short time after, but as soon as circumstances allowed, she retired from the public eye in favor of the less public, but considerably more labor-intensive work of running a boarding house with her mother. That move didn't seem to keep her too far from the public eye.
The boarding house was not far from the shop, so people continued to see her out there, and she did not lack insutors. Details of her love life still popped up in the press from time to time, and all of New York knew that there was a considerable amount of competitive friction between two particular men who had both been borders at the house. Daniel Payne was her good for nothing fiancé, and Alfred Cromwellin was a steadfast but apparently bland would be suitor. After a period of relative quiet where her primary issues seemed to be her fiancé's love of drink and everyone else's lack of love for the pairing, she suddenly disappeared a second time in August 1841.
This disappearance came to a rather more bitter but no less mysterious conclusion, three days later when the body of a young woman was found floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. With this, the narrative flips from Jennifer Anderson's style, romantic gossip, to Nicole Brown Simpson's style, gruesome infamy. Her body bears the evidence of a savage sexual attack and murdered by ligature and manual strangulation, and her features are so distorted by her attack and the elements that she is initially identified as Mary, literally from the arrangement of her arm hair. Already a media phenomenon in life, her death created a full, blown media frenzy.
A woman who by all rights should have lived a long life in complete obscurity instead frozen into bitter immortality at just 20 years old. As Stache Hour puts it, in life, Mary Rogers had inspired a great deal of leaden poetry. In death, she called forth an entire shelf of badly written novels. As a result of her pre-established fame, some really puzzling actions by both her and several of the people closest to her in her last days, her shocking and gruesome end and the deeply unfortunate law enforcement treatment of the case, we have a uniquely detailed and yet frustratingly useless record of her death.
This is a story of bald political wrangling, media meddling, investigatory incompetence, and one unreal figure after another. Popular rumors included an attack by a roving gang of murderous rapists, a staged cover-up of a botched abortion, murdered by her ne'er-du-well fiancé, a jealous attack by the spurned suitor Cromlin, who was, not incidentally, the same man who identified her arm hair, and even persistent rumors of a completely faked death and disappearance compounded with mistaken identity. Considering the level of print dedicated to this woman, the full details of her disappearance are unbelievably hazy. There was never an arrest or trial, and the press of the time tended to present a great deal of directly contradicting information and sometimes outright fabrication as established fact.
It did not help matters when the press caught wind of the later, guilt-ridden suicide of Mary's fiancé Daniel by opiate overdose in the spot thought to be the place of her death, or when they heard of the questionable second-hand deathbed confession of a suspected back alley abortion performed by Frederica Loss, the woman who claimed to be one of the last people to see Mary alive and who owned the self-same land that was now suspected death plays to Mary and her fiancé. Policing at the time was based more on deterrence than investigation, and due to jurisdictional confusion, New York and New Jersey police forces treated the case like a hot potato. Such attempting to voice the financial responsibility for the investigation onto the other. The abysmal mishandling of her multiple post-bournum examinations, the lack of attention to any potential crime scene, and the lack of solid detective footwork in the case were common subjects in contemporary media.
The press did their share of interfering and confusing matters, and so this was very much the John Bonnet Ramsey case of its time. The lack of helpful action and satisfactory resolution by law enforcement so shocked an incensed society that her grim end may have single-handedly led to overhauling the entire attitude toward policing in the Metro-New York area. Stashauer does a great job of methodically laying out the circumstances of Mary's life and death, firmly seeding them in the historical context, explaining the sentiments which variously directed public opinion one way or another, and keeping focus on the core of the story. Like pretty much everyone else in New England, Edgar Allan Poe closely followed the case.
As forward motion in the case and his own financial security continued to wane, he concocted a plan to keep the investigation and his family afloat. The quote Stashauer, his plan as he told his friend's nodgrass was to take up the case in a manner that had never been attempted or 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 to offer his own conclusions as to what it occurred, even pointing a finger at a likely solution. In short, Poe suggested he would lay out a solution that could well force the New York police to reopen the investigation.
Poe looked to ride the media hype generated by the case, making claims designed to shame the police into action and showcase his own deductive abilities. He reframed the murder as a barely disguised work of fiction, using C. Auguste Pem, a character that he had already established in a previous story with a great deal of success. Just as Mary was the original It Girl, D'Pem was the original genius detective.
Despite its relative success, Poe was critical of his previous detective piece featuring D'Pem, the murders in the roomorg. Though it became the blueprint for the modern detective story, the way it was constructed bothered him. Normally, a mystery writer decides on their solution and then backward engineers the story. They make sure as they write that they include all the necessary details to support that conclusion, and this is what he had done with his first detective story.
But that didn't sit right with him. Where is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself have woven for the express purpose of unraveling, he said? And so he leveraged this dissatisfaction to make this new story especially groundbreaking. Since Poe attempted as much as possible to stick to the known framework of a true murder case, he actually had to deduce his own logical solution and provide supporting arguments for that based on a closed system of known facts.
This story was published in three installments between October 1842 and February 1843. However, the sensational but questionable deathbed abortion confession which many thought held the answer to the mystery hit the stance between the publishing of his second and third installments. As a result, he actually delayed releasing his conclusion at what he felt was great risk to his reputation to do a massive, last minute overhaul of the final part. While some of the science is pretty questionable and he doesn't name a culprit identifiable enough to solidly close the Rogers mystery, he does present a reasonable new focus of inquiry and overall it is a fairly solid treatment.
It is not difficult to see why this story garnered so much attention then, why it served as an inspiration for law enforcement, and why it has since stood the test of time. He later republished the story as one piece and used the opportunity to tighten up the three parts into a hole so that the whole narrative flows a bit better with the overhauled by his portion. That addition is how we commonly see it today and such was his skill with words that even the way in which he re-edited the story was praised for its incredible subtlety. As further framework to the sad story of Mary Rogers, Stachey were talks about the harsh life of Poe himself.
While not exactly flattering, it really helps to highlight both his brilliant wit and his, let's call it famously morbid and melancholic self-absorption. Be warned before reading, this is definitely one of those never meet your idol's situations. Poe was a man possessed of an astounding level of wit, inventiveness and persuasive power. Sadly, these seemed inseparable from his abrasiveness, ego, and famous ability to insert his foot into his mouth.
It feels shocking to think something so revolutionary did so little for its creator at the time, but when you see it in context of his actions, it is all too obvious. He needled, drank, complained, and viciously attacked his way into disinheritance, unemployment, sickness, poverty, loneliness, and social ruin, and he did it again and again, almost as if driven. It was so painful to track his continued decline that I almost had to imagine these choices in the framework of a Faustian bargain to make sense of it. It's like at some point in his teens he made a deal with some demon in which every turn of phrase which made his writing immortal and his name famous was purchased by making life choices that made his daily existence nearly unbearable.
There is of course so much more to both of these figures than I've expressed here, and I do highly recommend Daniel Stacheyow's book for the full story. The beautiful cigar girl, Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the invention of murder is a balanced portrait of a complicated man, and is well framed a portrait as one could expect of such a short-lived and mysterious woman. As a special Halloween slash launch bonus, I've recorded an especially Edgar Allan Poe tastic second part to today's episode. Don't forget to hit Coidopro, Quo Cast on Twitter, Facebook, or on our dot com, and check that episode out as well.
As of today, we're not up on iTunes, but it's in the works. Writing Production of Quid Pro Quo by Elle. The beautiful cigar girl, Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the invention of murder by Daniel Stacheyow. Any quoted or referenced materials will be listed in the episode write up for further research and discussion.
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