Plotting Murder: Genre, Plot and the Dead Narrator

Robertson Davies’s 1991 novel, Murther and Walking Spirits, opens with a quotation from the notebooks of Samuel Butler, which provides both a knowing nod to the market and a bill of fare for the coming tale. Davies’s novel (which describes the afterlife of its narrator, as he attends a film festival about his family history) takes its title and epigraph from Butler’s comments on the printing trade, which suggest that the pinnacle of popular fiction is the plot that can combine both the ghost story and the murder mystery:

Printers finde by experience that one Murther is worth two Monsters, and at least three Walking Spirits. For the consequence of Murther is hanging, with which the Rabble is wonderfully delighted. But where Murthers and Walking Spirits meet, there is no other Narrative can come near it. (Butler qtd. in Davies, 1991)

Hanging is the pleasure that comes from reading about murder, and contained within this is a gruesome satisfaction much like the ‘abominable fancy’ of the saved witnessing the torments of the damned, but also the closural pleasure of solved crimes and justice done. Today, the rabble and the printers (or, popular, marketable fictions and their consumers) continue to be wonderfully delighted by narratives where murders and walking spirits meet.