New York City, July, 1841. The fully clothed body of Mary Rogers is found floating in the Hudson River. She has been sexually assaulted and beaten to death. Graphic artist Rick Geary sets out this unsolved mystery in careful and solid black and white, starting out with a bibliography of nine books and three pages of maps to highlight the documentary nature of this tale.

Although The Mystery of Mary Rogers is a sensational story about murder, the real subject is New York City. Geary uses the tale to convey the feel of everyday life in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the city had half a million inhabitants and occupied only the lower half of the island of Manhattan. We get a sense of the class divisions, the role of the press, the lowlife criminal elements, the police and the judiciary. Geary’s drawings do well in conveying the geography of the growing city, the contrast between urban density and the rural beauty of the New Jersey shore around Hoboken, and the variety of clothes worn by the different classes.

On the whole though, I found the book disappointing. I recently visited the excellent Lower East Side Tenement Museum and saw inside one of the tenement buildings in what is now China Town. What that visit made clear, and what is lacking from Geary’s book, is a sense of the crowded nature of the city, its smells, and its darkness. Geary’s illustrations make the city look clean and almost quaint. Also lacking in Geary’s telling of the story is any psychological detail: we learn very little about poor Mary or any other of the main characters, apart from what they did. Mary is simply drawn as a wide-eyed innocent, while most of the other characters have even more exaggerated cartoonish faces. This is a story told on the surface, a show and tell, leaving it mysterious not only whodunnit, but also why anyone does anything.

Categories: General