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There’s a gamelike element to being a detective—the seeking of hidden information, the identification of patterns, the piecing together of clues, the “Eureka!” of discovery. Several legendary fictional detectives have been expert game players and puzzle solvers. Inspector Morse had a passion for crosswords; Lord Peter Wimsey decoded ciphers. Hercule Poirot, that shrewd know-it-all, solved a chess-related murder by scrutinizing a Ruy Lopez opening and the unconventional use of a white bishop. (The piece had been electrified.) Part of the pleasure of reading detective stories, and of watching them on TV, is the gratification of getting to play along—with the investigation and with the seductive idea that human misdeeds can be definitively understood. That idea feels especially appealing right now. It’s a good time, in other words, for the British detective comedy “Ludwig,” on BritBox starting this week, in which mysteries become actual puzzles, solved by an ingenious maker of crosswords and cryptograms. Created and written by Mark Brotherhood, “Ludwig” was a hit in the U.K. and has been renewed for a second season. It stars David Mitchell, who excels at embodying a certain kind of appealingly awkward everyman—the kind whose white-hot rumination, no matter how clever, yields few social rewards. Here, Mitchell is a grizzled, reclusive homebody who prefers puzzles to people, and who must suddenly reckon with both, in the outside world. Viewers emerging from the work-at-home era may recognize themselves. But, unlike most of us, Ludwig happens to be a genius. “Two points above, actually,” he says in one episode. “But I find that never helps when it comes to . . . chatting.”
Mitchell has long performed as half of a comedy duo with Robert Webb; meme-conscious Americans will recognize “Are we the baddies?,” from their show “That Mitchell and Webb Look,” in which two S.S. officers fret about their uniforms’ skull insignia. The rudely brilliant “Peep Show,” co-created by Jesse Armstrong (“Succession”), featured them as hapless odd-couple flatmates—Mitchell the uptight overthinker, Webb the freewheeling oaf. (“She knows about cubits, she’s not comfortable in her own skin—she’s one of me!” Mitchell’s character excitedly thinks about an attractive shoe-store clerk.) In “Ludwig,” Mitchell is in a kind of comedy duo with himself. Primarily, he plays John Taylor, a man with an identical twin, James. But John also has another double: he’s known to fans by his nom de puzzle, Ludwig. (The opening scene has notes of “Für Elise,” and Beethoven motifs recur throughout.) He spends his days alone, in his late parents’ house, happily working, surrounded by easels, a shelf full of Ludwig volumes—cryptograms, logic puzzles, crosswords, mathematical puzzles, codices—and family photographs, with Mitchell in duplicate. As the story begins, James goes missing, and his wife, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), begs John to help find him—by impersonating him. Ooh! It isn’t easy to get a hermit to leave the house, but these are extraordinary times, and out he goes.
The puzzles come thick and fast. James, a police detective, has disappeared after some strange doings at work, leaving behind a mysterious letter with covert messages that John helps decode. James has squirrelled away a secret notebook at the police station, and John must find it. John haltingly impersonates James, and is immediately pulled into a murder investigation: a top solicitor has been stabbed with an antique letter opener! And away we go. The most intractable puzzle, for John, is how to act like a socially confident family man unfazed by the outside world. The comedic possibilities of social awkwardness have been explored thoroughly in the past couple of decades in British and American entertainment, but Mitchell is especially good at evoking it, and the way it happens in “Ludwig” feels new. The series manages to function as a comedy, a drama, and a mystery procedural at once, and the awkwardness isn’t only for fun. In one great early scene, John gets so overwhelmed by the goings-on amid suspects and officers at the crime scene that he runs outside and calls Lucy. “I can’t do this, Lucy!” he says, hyperventilating. “I don’t know how anybody can. . . . I’m talking about all of it, I’m talking about just getting up in the morning and leaving the house—coming out here to this, all this! Crowds and noise and buildings and offices and computers and people! Nobody seeing each other, and everybody talking at once! Alarms going off, phones ringing, everybody moving around, up and down and in and out, and no order to any of it, no structure, no purpose!” They have a heartfelt chat, on her end, at least—but John is suddenly thinking about patterns, mind awhirl. He abruptly signs off. “Bit awkward, really,” he tells her. “I think I might have just solved a murder.” Back amid James’s colleagues, he sketches out a huge diagram—“a concatenation of syllogisms, obviously”—and neatly dispatches each suspect’s comings and goings. Result: the murderer could only have been Person B, on the x-axis. Crime solved, hero made, double life established.
So it goes for the next several episodes, with John getting pulled into one investigation after another, and solving each dazzlingly, while Lucy, with his periodic help, toils away on the where-the-hell-is-James mystery. With this, she would like a bit more help and focus, please. But the murders! “What if there’s another one today?” John asks. “How often do people get murdered around here?” Paperwork, she tells him. “Just use the phrase ‘mountain of.’ You’ve seen the crime shows!” (It’s fun to watch John delight in the kinds of small-talk gambits that help him grease the wheels of interaction. At work, he seizes on someone’s reference to a case involving “that Sinclair business.”) Murder-wise, “Ludwig” is full of what we want from escapist fare—awful doings in an old manor house or a cathedral, intriguing suspects with weird weapons and elaborate schemes—and John solves it all, using an array of techniques. One mystery hinges on the kind of spot-the-difference challenge you’d find in Highlights magazine (“Basically an entry-level puzzle!” John fumes), one employs a chessboard and a Rube Goldbergian chain of events, and so on. The series occasionally makes use of an aesthetic that appeals to a puzzle-lover’s sensibility—mise-en-scènes rich with boxes and grids, hints of Escher and Mondrian. (For some of us, another layer of puzzling is Where have I seen that actor?, as with the lugubrious chief constable, dimly recognizable as David Brent’s odious pal Finchy.)
Though much of “Ludwig” feels comfortingly familiar, and orderly in its methods, it’s refreshingly its own thing, too, subverting conventions not just of genre but of trope. One example is that of the meddling amateur detective who continually annoys the professionals, à la Miss Marple or Father Brown, often resulting in a tedious “Step aside, little lady” dynamic. It’s fun to watch John posing as a cop, and getting away with it; the other investigators are, in fact, suspects in the James mystery, and we begin to form suspicions and allegiances as they solve each crime. The only person who’s had it with his crime-solving is Lucy, but that’s not tedious, either. There’s a tender dynamic between the two, a kind of sublimated love that comes from mutual understanding. James and Lucy have a teen-age son, Henry (Dylan Hughes), and throughout the series John lives with them, taking on a pseudo-James role that’s both strange and reassuring to all. Gradually, they find some harmony, and Henry joins in on the sleuthing. Trying to understand one of John’s inscrutable co-workers, Henry asks him, “Is she a goodie or a baddie?” A question for the ages.
“Ludwig” rewards social connection and focussed attention in an era defined by their absence. We watch in satisfaction as John emerges from his cave of solitude, startling people with his social discomfort and then wowing them with the very skills he honed in isolation. After John’s first day at the office, he tells Lucy that he’ll return to it tomorrow, to keep sleuthing and trying to decode that secret notebook. She’s touched—and amazed. “It’s a puzzle!” he says. “Puzzles are meant to be solved.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
