The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashower, 326 pages

This historical true crime book is about the July 1841 murder of Mary Rogers, a well-known "cigar girl" in New York City. There was not yet a unified police force in the city, and so the murder went unsolved. A year later, Edgar Allan Poe decided to use his fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin to solve the mystery through his story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget."

I really enjoyed this book, as it combined a biography of one of my favorite authors and an overview of the murder of Mary Rogers and the subsequent investigations. Stashower also analyzes the aforementioned short story, and how Poe used the newspaper reports of the time to come to his conclusions. There is even some history of the newspapers in New York at this time. If you are an Edgar Allan Poe aficionado, a fan of true crime, or interested in early 1800s New York, this is the book for you! You will definitely learn something new.

Steampunk Poe

Steampunk Poe illustrated by Zdenko Basic &  Manual Sumerac  263 pp.

I love the work of Edgar Allan Poe. I ordered a copy of this book thinking it was Poe stories rewritten with steampunk elements. I was very disappointed to discover it was just a collection of seven Poe stories and six poems with random steampunk style illustrations. Four of the stories were popular ones but three, "The Balloon Hoax", "The Spectacles", and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" I had not read before. The poems were ones I had read before and included "The Raven" (of course), "To Helen", and "The Bells." It was nice to revisit old Poe favorites and enjoy some not so well known but that is not what I expected from this book.