Book Review: Broadway Butterfly
Broadway Butterfly by Sara DiVello (Thomas & Mercer, 2023).
It’s the Roaring Twenties in New York City, and Dot King has been living the dream—more or less. A glamorous model ensconced in a fashionable apartment with multiple men at her beck and call, she appears to have it all. But behind the scenes, the pressures Dot faces are steadily escalating—until one morning, her maid walks in to find Dot’s dead body sprawled across the bed.
Broadway Butterfly is based on a true story, that of a poor young Irish-American girl named Anna Keenan who transformed herself into Dot King, “a scandalous flapper who kept scandalous hours.” Nothing in her life was simple—not her family relationships, nor her relationships with men, nor her financial arrangements—and nothing came easy. But through sheer willpower, she propelled herself as high as she could go in the glittering stratosphere of 1920s Manhattan … until someone brought her crashing down to earth.
The narrative shifts back and forth among four different people whose lives and careers are affected by the murder. There’s Ella Bradford, the maid who discovered Dot’s body; Julia Harpman, a newspaper reporter covering the case; Inspector John D. Coughlin, investigating the case; and Frances Stotesbury Mitchell, a wealthy socialite whose connection with Dot isn’t revealed right away—primarily because she isn’t yet aware of it herself.
Through the eyes of the various people around her, we see Dot’s life as a sort of kaleidoscope that kept changing from moment to moment. Ella, grateful for Dot’s kindness and generosity—qualities that have been far too rare in the life of a Black maid—is fiercely loyal to Dot’s memory. Dot’s ex-roommate, Hilda, liked her when she was sober but found her “unmanageable” when drunk. And Coughlin views Dot’s wild ways with contempt, even as he vows to catch her murderer.
As Julia tries to weave all these different views and circumstances into her articles, she becomes more and more dedicated to helping to get justice for Dot. In the process, we pick up a lot of fascinating details about what it was like to be a “girl reporter,” or a harried police detective, or a maid dealing with racial harassment, in that hectic time and place.
And we’re also reminded that when powerful people have secrets to keep—and when even those on the side of right fail to recognize their own biases and prejudices—justice proves elusive.
Now I need to give you a spoiler. Or rather, I need to draw your attention to a spoiler that the publisher has already given you. The book is advertised as being “based on one of the most notorious unsolved murders of the era.” When they say unsolved, they’re not kidding. It wouldn’t be fair to let you go into this book assuming that you’re going to find out who murdered Dot King, because you’re not.
So why read it? Because, frustrating lack of closure notwithstanding, Sara DiVello makes it worth reading. She pulls us so deeply into this shady, shifty world, full of characters all scrambling to survive in their own ways, that we feel we’re experiencing all this with them. (I was surprised, for instance, by just how deeply Coughlin’s distaste for Italians got under my skin, even though I already knew how common it was in those days.) Reading this book feels like living through a murder case in real time, with all the shocking twists played out in the press and no one ever sure what the real story is. The loose threads left dangling feel all too realistic and all too timeless.
You may be left lamenting the lack of closure at the end of Broadway Butterfly. Or you may enjoy sifting through the characters’ various theories and trying to figure out what really happened. But in either case, I don’t think you’ll regret your time spent with those characters.
(Cover image copyright Thomas & Mercer.)
Book Links:
Broadway Butterfly on Amazon
Broadway Butterfly on Bookshop
(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)