Murther and Walking Spirits
Murther and Walking Spirits is a 1991 novel by Robertson Davies. It’s a modern ghost story about Gil Gilmartin, a film critic who comes home to discover his wife having an affair, and dies after being struck with a walking stick.
As a ghost, Gilmartin attends a strange film festival where the attendees watch “films” about his ancestors—such as a Tory from the American Revolution and a master carpenter who marries into a blue-blood family, only to endure a rocky divorce. These ancestral stories link the past to the present and drive the book toward its modern-day ending.
Gilmartin’s spirit can move on when his killer confesses to a newspaper editor, who suggests the punishment should be to carry the walking stick for the rest of his life—a living mark of Cain rather than imprisonment. Gilmartin also learns that he had secretly fathered a child with his wife, and that the visions of his forebears may be clues that the family line will continue. In the final scene, Gilmartin finds himself in the sky, addressed by a feminine voice who says she is not his mother but “the woman in the man.”
Davies drew on his own Welsh and United Empire Loyalist ancestry for the films shown in the book. The story opens with a Samuel Butler quote about Murthers and Walking Spirits and explains that “murther” is an archaic spelling of murder.
The book was not well received by critics and did not sell as well as Davies’s earlier works. Unlike his previous novels, it is not part of a trilogy, though there has been speculation that Davies planned a Toronto Trilogy that would have included The Cunning Man. In a later note, publisher Douglas M. Gibson said Davies had been researching a follow-up to The Cunning Man, which might have become the third book in that sequence.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 15:02 (CET).