Book Beginnings on Friday: The Beautiful Cigar Girl

I've been remiss on my Teaser Tuesdays lately so I'm going make it up, I hope, by jumping into this meme, hosted by the Few More Pages book blog. I'm reading The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashower, part of my current historical true crime kick.

Here are the first couple lines of the book, from the prologue:

In June of 1842, Edgar Allan Poe took up his pen to broach a delicate subject with an old friend. "Have I offended you by any of my evil deeds?" he asked. "If so, how? Time was when you could spare a few minutes occasionally for communion with a friend."

The opening effectively establishes Poe as a supplicant, if a persistent one. I'm about a third of the way through the book now and so far it's a lot more Poe than Mary Rogers, the murder victim (which makes sense -- we know a lot more about his life than hers).

I'm kind of dubious about the subtitle -- the invention of murder -- but at least it doesn't call it the crime of the century like the majority of the other historical true crime books sitting on my desk at the moment.

You may be hearing more about this book in the future: In googling around for a book cover image, I discovered reports that it's being made/has been made? into a movie ... starring the reclusive Joaquin Phoenix as Edgar Allan Poe.