The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (10 page)

The murder fascinated Poe for reasons other than his personal knowledge of the victim. Undoubtedly the crime had particular appeal to Poe because it remained unsolved. This untidy fact made it a puzzle. Quite plainly, the pieces were all there. But they had not been properly put together. Poe was, as we know, a fanatic about puzzles. He enjoyed nothing more than to match his mentality against the most difficult cryptograms, codes, riddles, enigmas. Mary Rogers was such a challenge to his intellect.

He toyed with the idea of a story based on Mary Rogers, but he did not write it for fully six months after news of the crime had died down. When he finally did convert it into his second detective tale, it was created less out of an inner compulsion than out of an outer need for additional finances. Indirectly, it was Virginia Poe who was responsible for Mary Rogers being put to paper.

The weeks when Poe had been following the crime were, relatively, the most peaceful and secure of his entire life. In all the years before, he had never known normality. Orphaned by his actor parents at the age of two, he had spent five years in England with his guardian, a Scotch merchant. Entering the University of Virginia, he caroused and ran up gambling debts amounting to $2,500, and was withdrawn after less than a year’s attendance. Poe enlisted in the army as a private, was bought out by his guardian, then sent to West Point, where he was promptly court-martialled for neglecting roll calls and disobeying his superiors. On a visit to Baltimore, he met his father’s youngest sister, Maria Clemm, and his cousin, a frail child named Virginia, and thereafter he was never apart from them.

When Poe was twenty-four, he married Virginia, who was thirteen. It is thought that their marriage of twelve years was never consummated. We know that Maria Clemm encouraged the marriage. Whether it was because she wanted a provider, as some critics have insisted, or because she wanted a son, we shall never be certain. Of Poe’s union with Virginia, Montagu Slater has observed: “He married Virginia and lived under Maria Clemm’s apron because for some reason he dare not live with a normal woman, he was afraid of sex and afraid of life. Why? Oscar Wilde included him in a list of celebrated homosexuals.”

Poe’s sex life, or rather his lack of it, as well as his excessive drinking, made him a cadaver upon which psychiatric amateurs, and professionals as well, have fed since the advent of Freud. Since no analyst ever met or treated him, there is no means by which the accuracy of their guesses may be estimated. One analyst, Marie Bonaparte, who put the known facts of Poe’s life on the literary couch some years ago, thought he drank “to fly from the dire and unconscious temptations evoked in him by the dying Virginia”. Other psychiatrists have concluded that he loved Virginia and hated her, that he wanted her dead and feared she would die. Whatever his real torments and fears about facing reality, his admirer Baudelaire sensed that his greatest torture was that he had to make money—in a world for which he was unequipped.

But in 1842, in Philadelphia, Poe was briefly making his way for the first time. He was not drinking, and he was less moody than ever. To supplement his meagre earnings on
Graham’s
he often wrote stories at night in the downstairs front parlour of the three-storey brick house he had rented on the Schuylkill River. Life was difficult but well knit when suddenly, during an evening in January 1842, the whole thing unravelled—forever.

On that fateful evening Virginia was playing the harp and singing. Suddenly she “ruptured a blood vessel”. From that moment until her death five years later, she was an invalid, consumptive and haemorrhaging. And Poe came apart. He drank and he took opium and he destroyed every small opportunity. In four months he was finished as editor of
Graham’s
.

Soon his financial situation became desperate. He tried to obtain a federal job in Washington, but ruined the chance when he made his appearance drunk and wearing his clothes inside out. In Philadelphia every new day was a threat. Maria Clemm, though she pawned Poe’s books, had only molasses and bread to serve for meals. The ailing Virginia kept warm in bed by encouraging her pet cat, Catarina, to curl upon her bosom. In desperation, Poe turned his torn brain back to the subject of freelance fiction. And at once he remembered Mary Cecilia Rogers.

He wrote her story in May of 1842, seated before the cold fireplace of his Philadelphia parlour, scribbling steadily “on rolls of blue paper meticulously pasted together”. He employed, for reference, the clippings he had saved on the actual crime, and his thinly fictionalized story quoted many of the Mary Rogers news stories word for word. “ ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity,” he explained later, “and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded. Thus much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been upon the spot and visited the localities.” The manuscript, completed, ran to over twenty thousand words in length.

On 4 June 1842, Poe wrote an inquiry to George Roberts, editor of the popular
Boston
Times
and
Notion
Magazine
:

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.”