[Bailey is an English-born journalist, nonfiction writer, novelist, and critic. In the review below, he discusses Murther & Walking Spirits, remarking on the unexpected turns in Davies's plot and the protagonist's development.]

The epigraph to Robertson Davies's new novel, Murther & Walking Spirits, is as apt as can be. It comes from the Samuel Butler who was a 17th-century poet and satirist: "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."

Mr. Davies wastes no time in putting into effect this antique prescription for a best seller. His protagonist narrator, Connor Gilmartin, the entertainment editor of The Colonial Advocate ("the very good newspaper" in Toronto), is murdered in the first sentence. A few lines later, his spirit is on the loose, if not actually walking then flitting and eventually sitting for some days alongside his murderer, one Randal Allard Going, the paper's theater critic, who is also known as the Sniffer, from his habit of sniffing out literary influences in new plays and films. One of the Sniffer's conceits is to carry a walking stick whose handle conceals a cudgel. It is this weapon he has used without thinking on Gilmartin's temple when the editor surprises the critic in bed with Gilmartin's wife, Esme, an Advocate columnist on women's affairs.

This reviewer sniffs no influence here other than that of a great tradition of theatrical high jinks. Gilmartin immediately sees Going and Esme with new, albeit deceased eyes. While Going begins to weep hysterically over the corpse, Esme—claim and collected, if still naked—gets rid of the fingerprints. When her lover has managed to pull himself together, she sends him off: "He went … though his face was tense with pain. But then, who notices when they meet a theatre critic whose face is tense with pain? It is one of the marks of the profession."

Esme dons a nightgown, calls the police and gives a polished performance as the dismayed wife, telling of an intruder who struck her husband. She is believed. Gilmartin watches his own body carried away; despite his demise, he has been feeling hungry and recalls being told that the digestive process continues for 45 minutes or so after death. In the next few days, he observes his own funeral, the reactions of his fellow newspapermen and the skill with which Esme puts her bereavement to use, soon starting work on a how-to book for widows. Meanwhile, Going is in growing distress. Gilmartin decides that, insofar as his unaccustomed condition permits, he will hound his murderer.

The reader may well smack his or her chops gleefully in anticipation of a revenger's comedy. But this would fail to take full measure of Robertson Davies, by no means a predictable writer. It is roughly 300 pages before Gilmartin's spirit begins to exact retribution from Going. Instead, his ghost pursues the murderer as far as a local film festival and then perches beside him as the Sniffer watches a series of classic movies. Gilmartin remembers feeling, while alive, that in cinemas "the half-darkness … spoke of that world of phantasmagoria and dream grotto of which I was aware as a part of my own life, which I could touch only in dreams or waking reverie. But film could open the door to it." Nevertheless, he thinks, having to sit beside the Sniffer for eternity watching even dearly loved films might be hell indeed.

The reader whose spirits may also be plummeting at such a prospect is wrong again. For Mr. Davies has something in mind other than disembodied reflections on The Battleship Potemkin or Ibsen's grandson Tancred's movie version of The Master Builder. Such films may be what the Sniffer sees. Gilmartin, however, watches a program meant just for him: a sequence of stories that inform him about his ancestral Dutch, Welsh and North American past.

Despite being decorated with terms like "rapid cutting" and "montage," the ensuing treatments do not come across as essentially cinematic, but rather as a series of novellas making use of a range of skillful fictional devices. In one, a loyalist family flees New York after the Revolutionary War and makes its arduous way to Canada by canoe. In another, an itinerant Methodist weaver-preacher in the mountains of North Wales adopts a poor lad named Gwylim ap Sion ap Emrys ap Dafydd ap Owain ap Hywel ap Rhodri ap Rhydderch ap Gryffyd and—mercifully—christens him Wesley Gilmartin. The Gilmartin line includes an honest tailor who goes broke and a dishonest servant who does well. Their lives are linked with trade and small shops; harried women make ends barely meet until a point when they no longer do. Then the Gilmartins emigrate to Canada and better fortune.

Once in a while, as Connor Gilmartin watches his "films," one may wonder a bit impatiently when the Sniffer will get his just deserts. Mr. Davies is a tremendously enticing storyteller, whether his characters are cajoling in Welsh brogue or portaging a canoe through the northern wilderness, but it's possible to ask now and then just how such and such an incident fits in the master plan of the book. On most occasions, however, the author, as if sensing our restiveness, provides an answer. Although suspicions are aroused that this is a brilliantly disguised family memoir, they can be set aside as unworthy, for one is in any event having a marvelous time hearing about these people, with a constant smile of either pleasure or amusement on the lips. And, toward the end, the weft in Mr. Davies's weaving helps make his pattern clear. Connor Gilmartin's spirit realizes that the family members he has always taken for granted, or seen merely as supporting players in his own personal drama, have starred in deeply felt shows of their own.

Having a spirit for a hero gives Mr. Davies creative opportunities. He looks at séances from the point of view of the departed (shades of Elvira in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit); he examines so-called after-death experiences, varieties of ghosts and the speculations of Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century Swedish scientist and religious philosopher, who believed in "a spiritual world populated exclusively by dead human beings, grouped in coherent societies." As far as this reader is concerned, Mr. Davies bestows upon his characters many likings that are wholly admirable: for the works of P. G. Wodehouse, for John Bunyan's Pilgrim hymn "He who would valiant be" and for a Wales that is wonderful despite being "too far, and too wet, and too unfashionable."

By the way, as is customary in a Robertson Davies work, there are splendid tidbits. We learn of the connection between laudanum and constipation and of Napoleon's love of the fake Scottish epic of Ossian. As for Canada, it produces no self-conscious exertions from Mr. Davies. Its people may be "inescapably" provincial, as Brochwel Gilmartin, father of Connor, thinks; but they are people who have importance as "patient lookers-on" and (unlike their southern neighbors?) "are not beguiled by the notion that the fate of mankind and of human culture lies wholly in our hands."

Although we have been waiting for the Sniffer's comeuppance, by the time it comes, in unexpected form, it no longer seems to matter so much. By then, Connor Gilmartin is aware of his own abbreviated life as a continuance of the lives of his forebears, and the unthinking act of murder that made him such a reflective spirit (and formed the primum mobile of this not at all spectral saga) scarcely requires vengeance.