Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
Quick answer: Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson: full summary with the ending, who the mysterious visitor is, themes of conscience and free will, and the story's craft.
On Christmas Day, in a shuttered London curiosity shop full of ticking clocks and tilted mirrors, a customer asks to see something for a lady, waits for the dealer to turn his back, and kills him. That is the first scene, not the twist. Everything that matters in Markheim happens after the murder, inside the murderer. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the story for a Christmas annual in 1885 and collected it in The Merry Men and Other Tales in 1887.
Readers who come to it from The Body Snatcher expect another tale of crime and haunting, and instead find something closer to Dostoevsky in miniature: a psychological trial with one accused, one witness and one impossible visitor. It has been argued over ever since, largely because Stevenson refuses to tell you plainly who, or what, walks up the stairs halfway through.
The story in brief, ending included
Markheim, a gentleman gone rotten by degrees, gambler, liar, thief, calls on an antique dealer on Christmas afternoon under the pretence of buying a gift. When the dealer stoops to show him a hand mirror, which Markheim has angrily rejected as a 'hand-conscience', he stabs him dead. Then the story slows to the pace of a nightmare. Alone with the body, the clocks and the mirrors, Markheim is besieged by sounds from the empty house, by the fear of the returning maid, and by his own multiplying reflections. He goes upstairs to find the dealer's money, and hears steps. The door opens, and someone enters who knows him: a figure whose face seems to shift, courteous, reasonable, familiar, who offers to help. It knows where the money is hidden, knows the maid is coming early, and asks only that Markheim be efficient about his own interests.
Markheim takes the visitor for the devil and argues with it for his soul, insisting that his acts are not the whole of him, that circumstances have dragged him down, that the will toward good survives beneath the deeds. The visitor, unimpressed, deals in conduct, not intentions, and presses him: kill the maid when she knocks, take the money, live. The bell rings. And at the point of total defeat Markheim discovers the one door still open: he cannot become good, but he can stop. If all active choices lead downward, he retains the freedom to refuse the next act. The visitor's features, watching this, brighten and soften with what looks strangely like triumph, or tenderness, and it vanishes. Markheim goes down and opens the door to the maid with the words that end the story: she should fetch the police; he has killed her master.
Three figures, one of them disputed
The cast is as small as a chamber play, and the middle figure is the exam question.
Themes: free will at the bottom of the pit
The standard readings are conscience and guilt, the doubleness of human nature that Stevenson would push further in Jekyll and Hyde a year later, and the Christmas setting as ironic frame, a redemption story scheduled on the calendar's most redemptive day. The mirrors and clocks carry the symbol work: reflection and time, the two things a murderer in an empty house cannot escape.
The sharper observation: Stevenson relocates freedom. Markheim's defence rests on intentions, the good self supposedly buried under bad acts, and the visitor annihilates that defence by pricing only behaviour. What survives is a freedom much smaller and much realer: the capacity to decline. The story's climax is not a conversion but a resignation, and its paradoxical claim, that a man can save his soul with a confession that will hang him, is what keeps philosophers and preachers quoting it.
The craft: interrogation as plot
Structurally, Markheim is a murder story played in reverse: the killing is dispatched in the first pages so that the real contest, argument, can occupy the climax slot. Stevenson makes debate feel like action by attaching a physical clock to it, the maid's approach, and by letting the setting do the emotional staging: candlelight doubling shadows, mirrors multiplying the guilty face, clocks disagreeing about the time as if the house itself were unreliable. The visitor's shifting face is the masterstroke, description used to withhold rather than reveal.
The stealable technique is the adversary who wins by agreeing. The visitor never threatens; it assists, flatters and accelerates, and Markheim is defeated into grace by the sheer logic of his helper's help. Contest writers should note the shape: a climax built from dialogue can outrun any chase scene if a hard deadline ticks underneath it, and character revealed under that kind of pressure is what emotional-impact scoring is designed to find.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, take a position on the visitor, tempter, angel or conscience, and cite its brightening features at the end as your key evidence.
- Use the mirrors and clocks as your symbol paragraph: reflection and time close in on the murderer.
- Pair Markheim with Jekyll and Hyde on the doubleness of self; the story is the novella's seed.
- When imitating Stevenson, put the crime first and make the aftermath your plot.
- Give your protagonist a tempter who only ever helps; assistance corners a character faster than threats.
- Attach a physical deadline to any long dialogue scene so the argument reads as action.
Try it yourself
Write a story that opens immediately after your protagonist's worst act, confined to one building and one hour. Someone arrives who offers only practical help in getting away with it, and let the help itself, step by logical step, drive your character to the one refusal that costs everything.
Questions
Who is the visitor in Markheim?
Stevenson never says. Markheim assumes it is the devil, but the figure's joy when Markheim chooses confession suggests an angel or the embodiment of his conscience. The deliberate ambiguity forces readers to judge the visitor by its effect, which is Markheim's salvation.
What happens at the end of Markheim?
When the maid rings the bell, Markheim rejects the visitor's advice to kill her and take the money. He goes down, opens the door, and tells her to fetch the police because he has murdered her master, choosing confession and certain execution over further evil.
Why does Markheim kill the dealer?
Ostensibly for money to feed his gambling and debts, under cover of buying a Christmas gift. The story treats the motive as almost incidental: its real interest is what the murder reveals, that Markheim has spent his life excusing a decline he could only ever stop, not reverse.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.