Around in the Snow [Part XIV]
The Mystery of Marie Roget
Zodiac’s first “buried treasure” puzzle, the Mt. Diablo Code, bears the unmistakable imprint of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Gold-Bug. Its sibling, the Pines Card, might remind us of Poe’s The Mystery of Marie Roget. That story was the sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered the first modern detective story, and itself ranks as the first fictionalized “ripped from the headlines” detective story. The Mystery of Marie Roget is closely modeled on one of New York’s most famous unsolved crimes, the 1841 murder of shop girl Mary Rogers. Poe transposed the real-life events to Paris. Mary Rogers became Marie Roget, the cigar shop where she worked became a parfumerie, and the body of the vanished girl surfaced in the Seine instead of the Hudson. In Poe’s tale, C. Auguste Dupin, the meerschaum pipe-smoking granddaddy of all literary detectives, brings every tool of “ratiocination” to bear to crack the case based entirely on public material from newspaper accounts. Poe acknowledged after the original publication that he wrote “Marie Roget” to offer his own analysis and proposed solution to the thinly-disguised Mary Rogers case.
In the Pines Card, Zodiac crafted a story about the “Tahoe Mystery” of Donna Lass heralded in the San Francisco Chronicle. Did he do it to confess to a murder or, like Poe, to offer his own theory based on facts already in the public domain? Or was the card “inspired by” current events but made for some other purpose entirely?
