Dial P for puzzle-maker

David Mitchell is not a performer known for his acting range. On the BBC panel show Would I Lie to You (YouTube), host Rob Brydon mocked Mitchell—star of the unbelievably good comedy series Peep Show—by mimicking his voice and saying “Shall I do posh and repressed, or repressed and posh?” This, while cruel, is a truism. Mitchell, who has made a career out of quoting Shakespeare when he isn’t playing Shakespeare, consistently comes across literate and wealthy (and haplessly dorky), which is what makes him perfectly cast for the new mystery series Ludwig.

- RAJA SEN

David Mitchell in mystery series 'Ludwig'.

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.