Mystery at the Blue Sea Cottage

Starred review from February 15, 2022
In this debut nonfiction work, Stewart investigates the circumstances surrounding the murder of a 20-year-old dancer in Jazz Age Southern California. Frieda "Fritzie" Mann didn't get to experience much of the Roaring '20s. In January 1923, the 20-year-old dancer was found dead on Torrey Pines State Beach a few miles north of San Diego. The case isn't as well known as other contemporaneous Hollywood-connected scandals, like silent film star's Fatty Arbuckle's arrest. Stewart uses trial transcripts, newspaper articles, and other primary sources to bring Mann--and the rapidly changing times in which she lived--alive in a fast-paced, thoughtful true-crime work that contextualizes the dancer's demise within the sociocultural climate of Prohibition-era America. "The story of Fritzie's tragic death was much more than an intriguing Jazz Age murder mystery; in many ways, it defined one of the most fascinating eras in U.S. history," he writes. At the time, Stewart reports, San Diego was "a backwater and Fritzie Mann wasn't famous," but in an age of yellow journalism that would make today's tabloids blanch, the media pounced on the case. Mann was the "right kind of victim, not just a young white woman, but a beautiful exotic dancer washed up dead in her teddies, who cavorted with Hollywood players and enjoyed assignations at beach cottages and got pregnant out of wedlock." Louis Jacobs, a physician in the U.S. Public Health Service who had been dating Mann, was charged with the murder. He was acquitted after a trial in which the prosecution theorized that he killed Mann while attempting to perform an abortion on her in a beachside cottage. Stewart ably depicts how the case reflects "the status of women in a changing--and unchanging--society" in which, "despite the apparent wave of liberalism and sexual freedom, the Victorian era moral code and associated laws lingered." Those laws included an almost complete ban on abortions, driving women to extremes to terminate their pregnancies. As America lurches toward overturning Roe v. Wade, Fritzie Mann's death carries a haunting resonance. Effectively shows how the relative liberalism of the Roaring '20s collided with a lingering Victorian moral code.

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