The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

by Wilkes, Roger

  Yours very truly,

  Edgar A. Poe

  Having completed this letter, Poe wrote two more, with similar contents, to other editors. One was to a friend, Dr Joseph Evans Snodgrass, of the Baltimore Sunday Visitor. In this letter Poe said: “I am desirous of publishing it in Baltimore… . Of course I could not afford to make you an absolute present of it—but if you are willing to take it, I will say $40.” The third letter was to T.W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.

  All three editors turned down the suggested story. Poe then sold it to the most unlikely market of all—Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion of New York, a periodical which the author contemptuously regarded as “the ne plus ultra of ill-taste, impudence and vulgar humbuggery”. Snowden’s ran “The Mystery of Marie Roget” as a three-part serial in their issues of November and December 1842 and February 1843.

  In the very opening paragraphs Poe gives full credit to Mary Rogers for inspiring the creation of Marie Roget. Then, for the second time in his fiction, Poe introduces the world’s first imaginary detective, the eccentric Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin who dwells in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with his friend, companion, and sounding-board, the unnamed narrator of the story. Ever since his solution of the killing of a mother and daughter at the hands of an ape in a sealed room in the Rue Morgue, Dupin has “relapsed into his old habits of moody revery”. In fact, he is so deeply “engaged in researches” that he has not left his shuttered rooms for a month, and is therefore unaware of a murder that is creating great agitation throughout Paris.

  The body of Marie Roget has been found floating in the Seine. Though the Sûreté has offered a reward of thirty thousand francs, there has been no break in the case. At last, in desperation, Prefect G of the Sûreté calls upon Dupin and offers him a proposition (presumably a sum of cash) if he will undertake the case and save the Prefect’s reputation. Dupin agrees to investigate.

  After obtaining the Sûreté evidence and back copies of the Paris newspapers, Dupin expounds on all the theories extant. Some sources believe Marie Roget is still alive; others, that she was killed by one of her suitors, Jacques St. Eustache or Beauvais, or by a gang. Dupin rejects all these theories, demolishing each with logic. He feels that the real murderer can be found by a closer study of “the public prints”. After a week he has six newspaper “extracts” that indicate the killer. These reveal that, three and a half years before, Marie Roget mysteriously left her job at Le Blanc’s perfumery and was thought to have eloped with a young naval officer “much noted for his debaucheries”. Dupin reasons that this naval officer returned, made love to Marie, and when she became pregnant he murdered her or saw her die under an abortionist’s instrument. He then disposed of her body in the Seine.

  Dupin points to the clues that will expose the killer. Letters to the press, trying to throw suspicion on others, must be compared with those written by the naval officer. The abortionist, Mme Deluc, and others, must be questioned. The boat which the officer used to dispose of Marie’s body must be found. “This boat shall guide us,” says Dupin, “with a rapidity which will surprise even ourselves, to him who employed it in the midnight of the fatal Sabbath. Corroboration will rise upon corroboration, and the murderer will be traced.”

  But in concluding his story Poe neglects to show Dupin catching and exposing the murderer. Instead, Poe concludes abruptly, using the trick of an inserted editorial note which announces: “We feel it advisable only to state, in brief, that the result desired was brought to pass; and that the Prefect fulfilled punctually, although with reluctance, the terms of his compact with the Chevalier.”

  There was no immediate discernible reaction to the magazine publication of “The Mystery of Marie Roget”. It was not until almost four years later, when the story appeared again as part of a collection of Poe’s fiction, that it made any impression at all. In July 1845 the publishing firm of Wiley and Putnam selected “Marie Roget” and eleven others of Poe’s narratives, out of the seventy-two he had written, for reprinting in book form. Before publication, however, Poe took great care to revise this story, as well as several others.

  In a series of factual footnotes Poe explained that “the lapse of several years since the tragedy upon which the tale is based” made the notes and revisions necessary. “A young girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, was murdered in the vicinity of New York,” he explained, “and although her death occasioned an intense and long-enduring excitement, the mystery attending it had remained unsolved at the period when the present paper was written and published (November 1842). Herein, under pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely parallelling the inessential facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object… . The confessions of two persons (one of them Madame Deluc of the narrative) made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained.”

  Wiley and Putnam’s 228-page pamphlet Tales by Edgar A. Poe appeared as Number XI of the firm’s Library of American Books, priced at fifty cents per copy, of which eight cents went in royalties to the impoverished author. Upon its appearance in the bookshops, it was heavily outsold by two competing imports from abroad: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas, and The Wandering Jew, by Eugène Sue. Nevertheless, it did attain a moderate sale.

  The real success of the Tales, on the heels of “The Raven”, which had been published six months earlier, was not financial but critical. The Boston Courier pronounced it “thrilling” and the New York Post recommended it as “a rare treat”. In London, the Literary Gazette considered its author a genius, and in Paris, Baudelaire was honoured to translate it into French. Of the twelve tales, “Marie Roget” created the greatest divergence of opinion. And, in the century since, the novelette has continued to divide its readers. Edmund Pearson thought it “rather tedious” and Howard Haycraft felt that it had “no life-blood”. Russel Crouse disagreed. “It is a brilliant study in the repudiation of false clues,” he said, “a fascinating document in the field of pseudo-criminology.”

  Whatever its actual literary merit, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” attained early immortality as one of the three tales—preceded by “The Rue Morgue” in 1841 and followed by “The Purloined Letter” in 1844—responsible for the founding of the modern detective story. Scholars have variously credited Herodotus, the Bible, and the Arabian Nights with this honour. Their erudition must be rejected as utter nonsense. As George Bates has remarked: “The cause of Chaucer’s silence on the subject of aeroplanes was because he had never seen one. You cannot write about policemen before policemen exist to be written of.”

  Organized crime-detection was in its infancy when Edgar Allan Poe created the character of Dupin. The mystery story was an unheard-of art form when Poe became, in the words of Willard Huntington Wright, “the authentic father of the detective novel as we know it today”. In “Marie Roget”, and in his two other crime stories, Poe prepared the mould for the first eccentric amateur sleuth and his thick-witted foil, a mould which a thousand authors have used in the years since. In these stories, too, Poe introduced the first of a legion of stupid police officers, red herrings, perfect crimes, and psychological deductions.

  After Poe, of course, came the deluge. But in his lifetime he had no idea of what he had wrought. His detective tales, as startling innovations, profited him little. With Virginia’s death, he buried Dupin. He dwelt in an alcoholic daze. He became engaged to several wealthy women, but married none. In Baltimore, bleary with drink, drugs, and insanity, he stumbled into the chaos of a Congressional election and was led by hoodlums from poll to poll to vote over and over again as a repeater. Left in a gutter without his clothes or his senses, he was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he groan
ed: “I wish to God somebody would blow my damned brains out.” It was on a Sunday’s dawn that he died murmuring: “God help my poor soul.”

  But seven years before, when he first wrote “Marie Roget”, he saw himself as something better. The character of C. Auguste Dupin was Poe’s idealization of himself, “a cool, infallible thinking machine that brought the power of reason to bear on all of life’s problems”. The name Dupin he had found in an article on the French Sûreté in Burton’s Magazine. This was probably André Dupin, a French politician who wrote on criminal procedures and died in 1865.

  The character of the blundering Prefect G was undoubtedly drawn from the very real, if quite improbable, François Vidocq, a French baker’s son who was sent to the galleys for thievery, and who later served as head of the Sûreté for eighteen years. Poe read Vidocq’s fanciful four-volume Mémoires, which contained the detective’s boast that he had placed twenty thousand criminals in jail. Poe was not impressed. He thought Vidocq “a good guesser” and a man who “erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close.”

  But the most important character in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” was the unhappy victim. And she, as Poe had told us, was Mary Cecilia Rogers.

  Despite her subsequent notoriety, Mary Rogers’s beginnings remain as enigmatic as her sudden end. For all the columns of copy published in the days following her death, Mary Rogers continues a shadowy, forever tantalizing figure of a young woman. She was born in New York City during 1820. There was, apparently, an older brother, who went to sea in his youth and engaged in a variety of speculative enterprises abroad. We know nothing of Mary’s father, except what Poe wrote of her fictional counterpart, Marie Roget: “The father had died during the child’s infancy, and from the period of his death … the mother and daughter had dwelt together.” As Mary grew up, her widowed mother, ill, nervous, harried by debt, sought some means of making a livelihood. This problem was solved by Mary’s seafaring brother, who returned from South America with profits gained from an obscure business venture. He presented a portion of these profits to mother and sister, then signed on a ship and sailed out of our story.

  Mrs Rogers wisely invested her windfall in a boarding-house at 126 Nassau Street in New York City. While the house gave Mary and her mother a roof over their heads, it gave them little else. At no time did it entertain more than two or three male boarders, and these were usually struggling clerks or labourers.

  To supplement the meagre income of the boarding-house, Mary Rogers decided to seek outside employment. This was in 1837, when she was seventeen. All accounts agree that she was beautiful. Crude contemporary prints depict her as a dark-eyed brunette, who wore her hair fashionably bunned. She had a complexion without blemish and an aquiline nose, and was much admired for her “dark smile”. She was favoured, too, with a full, firm bosom, a slender figure, and a manner of great vivacity. She did not have to look far for employment. Her beauty came to the attention of one John Anderson, a snuff-manufacturer who ran a tobacco shop at 319 Broadway, near Thomas Street. Aware that “her good looks and vivacity” would be an asset to a business which catered to male trade, Anderson installed Mary behind his counter. The store was already a popular hangout for gamblers, sporty bachelors, newspaper reporters, and magazine editors. With the appearance of Mary Rogers, the clientèle grew and improved.

  We know that during 1837 and 1838 Edgar Allan Poe frequented the tobacconist’s and was impressed with Mary Rogers. But there were other author customers, more prosperous and better known, who were equally impressed. Fitz-Greene Halleck, the somewhat forbidding, partially deaf, middle-aged poet, who had once served as secretary to John Jacob Astor, often appeared carrying his familiar green cotton umbrella. He was, it is said, sufficiently enchanted by Mary to write a poem rhapsodizing her beauty.

  James Fenimore Cooper, on his frequent trips to New York from Cooperstown, was another regular at John Anderson’s. He was a breezy, frank, pugnacious man, who had already published The Spy and spent a fortune instigating libel suits against reviewers who called his writings “garbage”. Cooper was uninhibited in his opinions, and highly vocal, and there can be little doubt he often sounded off to Mary on the money-madness of America and the provincialism of New York.

  The most famous customer, however, was fifty-four-year-old Washington Irving. He dwelt alone in a small stone Dutch cottage on the Hudson, and was known everywhere for his creation of Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle. A stout, genial, unaffected man, Irving must have entranced Mary Rogers with anecdotes of his youth. As a lawyer he had helped defend Aaron Burr. And he counted among his friends Dolly Madison, John Howard Payne, and Mary Godwin Shelley.

  Few of the customers attended Mary Rogers after shop hours. At her mother’s insistence, the proprietor, when he could, escorted her home at dusk. For New York was shot through with rowdyism. At nightfall the gangs, the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, rose out of the slums to molest, to maim, and to murder with butcher knives. It was estimated that in the waterfront area alone over fifteen thousand sailors were robbed of two million dollars in a single year.

  Though there was much that was unlovely in New York—Dickens disliked the spittoons as much as the slums, and Cooper objected to the pigs in the red-brick streets—there was also much that held attraction for a young lady. There were beer gardens that seated a thousand persons, and behind the wrought-iron fences of the great homes couples danced the polka and the waltz, and to the north of the city were vast green picnic grounds and glistening ponds for boating. There is every reason to believe that Mary Rogers enjoyed these pleasures.

  While she may not have dated her customers, there is evidence that Mary Rogers was a gay girl. After her death, much was made of her chastity. Dr Richard Cook, of Hoboken, who performed the autopsy, announced that Mary had been “a good girl”. He reaffirmed to the New York Herald “that previous to this shocking outrage, she had evidently been a person of chastity and correct habits”. Surely the good doctor’s diagnosis was more sentimental than scientific. From the number and variety of the young men who were interrogated after her death and who seemed to know her intimately, it is unlikely that Mary Rogers was a virgin.

  Especially she seemed to have great affection for numerous of her mother’s boarding-house guests. William Keekuck, a young sailor who had boarded with Mrs Rogers in 1840, had occasionally dated Mary, as had his older brother before him. Alfred Crommelin, for whom she left a rose on the last day of her life, was a handsome boarder characterized by the press as her “former suitor”. Daniel Payne, a cork-cutter and an alcoholic, lived under the same roof as Mary, dated her regularly, and intended to marry her. These were three escorts known by name. There were probably many more. In the light of her environment, it is surprising that Mary’s reputation was not worse. She had grown to maturity without paternal discipline, without family life, without security. Her beauty had marked her as a perpetual target for adventurous men-about-town. Her job, in a shop patronized solely by males, made her sophisticated beyond her years. Her oppressive financial status and her confinement to a rundown boarding-house, coupled with a lively personality, encouraged her to accept nocturnal escape with any attractive gallant.

  In October of 1838, when she was only eighteen, there occurred a curious interlude in the life of Mary Rogers. On the morning of Thursday, 4 October, she failed to appear for work at the cigar store. The same day, her distressed mother found a note from Mary on her bedroom table. The contents of the note, which Mrs Rogers turned over to the city coroner’s office, were never divulged. Three and a half years later, at the time of her death, the New York Herald told its readers: “This young girl, Mary Rogers, was missing from Anderson’s store … for two weeks. It is asserted that she was then seduced by an officer of the US Navy, and kept at Hoboken for two weeks. His name is well known on board his ship.”

  The reporters who frequented the cigar store, and knew Mary, quickly f
iled stories on her disappearance. With one exception, they all suspected foul play. The one exception was an anonymous cynic on the Commercial Advertiser who thought that the young lady had gone “into concealment that it might be believed she had been abducted, in order to help the sale of the goods of her employer”.

  After two weeks the erratic Mary returned to her mother and her job. She had no explanation to offer, beyond remarking that she had “felt tired” and gone to rest with some friends in Brooklyn. When she was shown a copy of the Commercial Advertiser, with its snide suspicions of hoax, she became furious. “She felt so annoyed at such a report having got abroad during her temporary absence on a country excursion,” said the Journal of Commerce, “that she positively refused ever to return to the store.” It is not known for certain, however, if she actually left John Anderson’s because her honesty was impugned by the customers, or if she left simply because her mother, ailing and infirm, required her assistance to help maintain the boarding-house. But leave she did, in 1839, some months after returning from her mysterious holiday.

  Her activities in the three years following are unknown. It is to be presumed that she spent her days cleaning and cooking in her mother’s boarding-house, and her nights supplying diversion for her mother’s paid-up roomers. We know that one boarder, Alfred Crommelin, ardently pursued her and was rejected. Her lack of interest determined him to remove his person from the boarding-house. However, he made it clear that if she had a change of heart, he might still be available. Another roomer, the convivial cork-cutter Daniel Payne, had more success. Though a man of limited means, he found ways to entertain Mary and became her most frequent escort. They soon reached an understanding, and Mary began to refuse all outside engagements. Payne was under the impression that they were engaged to be married. But before a date could be determined, another date occurred of more historic importance in the annals of crime.