THE CHIANTI FLASK

Standing trial for murder is only the beginning of a new widow’s tribulations in this breathless, mournful tale the author of The Lodger originally published in 1934.

Three weeks after Dr. Grant signed a death certificate indicating that Fordish Dousland had died of natural causes, his growing unease led him to contact the Silchester police, who arrested Laura Dousland for dosing her much older husband’s wine with rat poison. The question of her innocence or guilt evidently turns on the disappearance of a flask that held the victim’s final drink. Dousland’s Venetian servant, Angelo Terugi, testifies that he placed the flask on his master’s dinner tray and that it vanished in the confusion after his death; Sir Joseph Molloy, the barrister representing Laura, suggests that Terugi is confusing the events of the fatal evening with those three weeks before, when the stingy Dousland hid the flask the servant had brought him to prevent Terugi from finishing it himself. Sir Joseph’s questions are pointed enough to raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors, and Laura is found not guilty and set free. But not all that free, since her husband’s death leaves her penniless; the publicity from the trial follows her to Loverslea, where she takes refuge with John and Alice Hayward, who introduced her to Dousland while she was working as governess for their daughter, and Alice’s well-meant kindness becomes unbearably oppressive. Hiding under her mother’s maiden name, Laura accepts the invitation of Dr. Mark Scrutton, Dousland’s golfing acquaintance, to stay in an outbuilding of his parents’ home. But she can’t accept Mark’s professions of love, which precipitate an all-too-expected ending.

Eighty-six years on, Lowndes still presents a remarkably modern take on notoriety, guilt, and love.