‘Ludwig’ has typical Sunday television detective flair

In the show—streaming in India on the BBC Player section of Amazon Prime Video—Mitchell plays a puzzle-setter so highly regarded in his field that his sister-in-law refers to him as “the Elvis Presley of puzzle-setters". This man, John, who creates under the name “Ludwig", has been torn away from his study and his puzzles and his books, which include a handsomely bound eight-volume set of crossword books bearing the titular pen-name across their spines, because her husband—John’s identical twin brother, a police detective—is missing. She requests John to impersonate his twin, to nip into the police station and fetch his notebook, but when he tries to do this, he ends up solving a murder.

He can’t help himself, you see. Unlike life, a puzzle is logically meant to have a solution. Therefore we see Ludwig taking on locked-room mysteries and eclectic mixes of subjects with the efficiency of a master, reducing motives to afterthoughts, murders to logic problems and lining up every coincidence in sight till there are enough of them to be statistically significant. (Three, if you’re counting.)

It’s all typical Sunday television detective flair, but despite the bravado of his elaborate conclusions, Ludwig is so hapless—so far removed from Holmes and Poirot—that he never really appears heroic. His stunned audience of colleagues or confessors roll their eyes at him more than they applaud. Is it possible for someone to solve murders sheepishly? Apparently so.

Ludwig offers, therefore, a cosy bit of plotting to easily go with your tea and biscuits, yet this show of modest pleasures gets increasingly rewarding as it goes along, not least because Mitchell—who plays the reluctant but compulsive detective like an older version of Peep Show’s unforgettable, history-loving loser Mark—really sinks his teeth into the part. This author-backed role is the closest the actor has come to a dramatic character, and he displays a bumbling vulnerability and some raw fragility as he stammers his way to the denouement of each episode. This makes Ludwig, created and written by Mark Brotherhood, an interesting take on heroism itself, and how the world treats those who save the day when they can’t also park a car properly.

Anna Maxwell Martin is very solid as John’s determined sister-in-law Lucy, to the point of being exasperating. She’s the one least impressed by John’s mystery-solving exploits since they aren’t really helping them find her missing husband. “No more distractions," she insists. “That wasn’t a distraction," our puzzle-solving protagonist (justifiably) objects, “it was a murder!" Lucy, however, starts out with eyes firmly on the prize, her missing husband and soulmate who looks exactly like this nerdy idiot being awkward inside her house.

The plot does gradually thicken, but that almost seems besides the point. There’s something to love about the cosiness of this kind of British series, one where corpses go hand in hand with crumpets. Born in the genteel drawing rooms of Agatha Christie’s England, where poison was administered with the tea and murder solved before the scones went stale, this genre has always understood that death needn’t be dreary.

Christie, naturally, still remains Queen Mum. Miss Marple knitted while bodies dropped; Poirot preened and meticulously shaped his moustache (a significant priority, I agree) while his grey cells fired. These weren’t hard-boiled detectives drowning in whisky and existential dread: they were cerebral puzzlers who believed firmly that murder, however distasteful, could be discussed over sherry.

Television embraced this bloodless bloodshed with missionary zeal. Recent examples include Midsomer Murders, where an English village’s mortality rate rivals a war zone, and Father Brown, proof that cassocks and crime-solving can go smashingly together. These shows (both conveniently found under Amazon Prime’s BBC tab) understand the appeal: the violence is sanitised, the communities are quaint, justice is inevitable.

This is precisely the itch scratched by Richard Osman’s rollicking Thursday Murder Club novels (though I would strongly recommend skipping the lousy Netflix adaptation of the same) where septuagenarians solve murders from their retirement village with more panache than most professionals half their age. It’s Christie’s DNA spliced with contemporary wit, proving the cosy mystery remains gloriously, irrepressibly alive. Age, Osman suggests with a wink, brings wisdom. And occasionally, a knack for spotting killers.

The compulsive need for solving a puzzle—spotting a difference, finding a pattern, whittling down the variables—is an aspirational trait, I believe. When we hold one of those quaint wooden boxes that can only be opened through one secret method with a trick lever and an angle that elegantly fits just right, some of us put it back down again after exhausting the obvious. We would all, however, like to be the kind of people who don’t put the box down but instead find exactly where to press it to make it reveal its secrets. A cryptic crossword is the best kind.

Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.

Streaming tip of the week:

All 13 seasons of Poirot—starring the immaculate David Suchet as the great Belgian detective—can be streamed on SonyLiv. Agatha Christie’s detective has been immortalised on stage and screen, but this long-running television classic is arguably the finest take on the character.