Death Was the Other Woman
by Linda L. Richards

Author’s Insight

When I was a kid, I lived for a while in a structure on the boardwalk in Santa Monica that had been built during Prohibition as a luxury hotel. The building has since been gutted and is now once again a luxury hotel, but at the time I lived there it was not. It was an ageing dowager filled with a sort of dowdy glamour. It was an exciting place to be a kid.

I realize now that I probably first caught a glimpse of Kitty Pangborn as I ran through the halls and ballrooms and rotundas of that old hotel with my friends. I could see her on occasion: on the arm of a sharply dressed man, heading for an evening at the tables. Or wearing a swimming costume as she made her way through the tunnel under the boardwalk that came out on the private beach. I had a sense of her and I knew she was full of fun and ready for adventure. But I didn’t know who she was.

Something about that hotel and having fairly free access to beachfront Santa Monica and Venice in the 1970s made me cognizant of the tenuous nature of the  physical history of that area. A lot of what was then fading Prohibition-era glamour is gone now. Just gone.  And I didn’t realize it at the time but, even then, a lot of what I was seeing had already been altered beyond recognition.

Of course, these things are true everywhere. Time molds things as she passes. New things spring up, others fade to memory. But sometimes it just seems more true in Los Angeles. LA is such a young city and her periods of growth have often been dramatic to the point of violence. All that paving of Paradise. But sometimes in all that paving and moving and shaking something falls off, comes lose. And something new is born.

And here we are.

Death Was the Other Woman

Reading Group Guide

About this Guide:

In the United States, the end of Prohibition dovetailed against the beginning of the Great Depression. Alone, each of these events create an important historical landmark. Together they synergize a nexus that creates the political and emotional environment that make the events in Death Was the Other Woman possible.

The questions in this guide are intended to provide a framework against which your group’s discussions of Death Was the Other Woman can be laid.

 

1. Describe your first impressions of Kitty and Dex. What was your first opinion of them? In what ways did those opinions change throughout the novel? How did they stay the same?

 

2. Prior to reading Death Was the Other Woman, what did you know about the Depression? Was there any knowledge of the era that illuminated your reading of the book?

 

3. How would you characterize the relationship between Kitty and Dex? How would you expect it to evolve? Did you find yourself identifying with one more than the other?

 

4. Consider the character of Mustard. What does the fixer represent for Kitty? What does his presence add to your understanding of Kitty Pangborn? Of Dex?

 

5. Several of the characters in Death Was the Other Woman live a life that is not entirely within the law. What does Kitty think of the choices these people make? Is it something she understands and accepts? Why or why not? What about you? When you hear of people going against the law in modern day, what assumptions do you make? Would any of those assumptions be valid in the case of these characters?

 

6. Long before the events in Death Was the Other Woman occur, Dex played a role on the battlefields of W.W.I. How do you think the war touched him? Would Dex be the same person if he hadn’t seen action in Europe?

 

7. Discuss the character of Brucie. What role or roles does she play in the lives of those around her?

 

8. Did Kitty Pangborn remind you of any other historical or fictional figures? If so, who and in what way? Where else have you seen the story of a young woman taking charge of her life and making the best of a bad situation? Of women of history rising to equality without shedding the trappings of the conventional lives of their times? What, if anything, makes Kitty different?

 

9. Were you surprised at Brucie's duplicity? Why or why not? How did this news change your view of Rita? Did you see her as more or less culpable in the events that occurred?

 

10. At times, Prohibition is almost a character in Death Was the Other Woman. It shades and shadows the action in the novel. In what ways would Death Was the Other Woman be different if Prohibition were not a factor? How would it be the same? Take it another step: how would the novel be different if it were set in modern times?

 

11. Many of the attitudes in Death Was the Other Woman reflect the sensibility of a different era. In what way is the novel politically incorrect for our time? Did you find any of these sensibilities offensive? What things are better now? What things are worse?

 

12. Kitty begins Death Was the Other Woman as an innocent and, in some ways, she’s an innocent as the book ends, as well. However, she’s undeniably affected by the events that take place in the story. In what way did you feel she was robbed of her innocence? In what ways did she spare it? Did you feel she should have let it go?