Add Ludwig to your watchlist

On the face of it, Ludwig – a series about a newspaper puzzle-setter who solves murders – could have been made in a lab for TV success. Launching in 2024, it combines the great British public’s affection for puzzles, closed-circle murder mysteries, amateur sleuths and scenic cathedral cities with such aplomb that it was one of the biggest hits of the year and arguably kick-started a renaissance for “cosy crime” on TV. After all, the schedules are now crawling with quirky outsider detectives applying their special skills to matters of murder.

“It’s the collective zeitgeisty thing that often happens,” series creator Mark Brotherhood tells RT. “Death Valley certainly followed us very quickly, though obviously that had been in production at the same time. It’s all coincidental. It’s just generally in the air.”

Still, if this kind of “cosy” fictional murder is more puzzle than tragedy, could we say Ludwig gets to the heart of that appeal more quickly than others?

“We’ve bottled it right down, haven’t we?” Brotherhood agrees, laughing. “It’s really quite the formula of what ‘cosy crime’ is: eccentric outsider solves puzzles. We’ve got right down to the essence.”

It’s the formula of what cosy crime is: eccentric outsider solves puzzles

In series one, we were introduced to David Mitchell as John Taylor, a reclusive puzzle-setter (Ludwig is his pen name) and twin brother of the more successful James, a DCI with a wife and son (Anna Maxwell Martin and Dylan Hughes). But when James goes missing, wife Lucy recruits John to pose as his sibling, infiltrate Cambridge police and uncover the conspiracy around his disappearance. And as it turns out, the socially awkward “Ludwig” is a dab hand at applying his puzzling skills to crime scenes, clearing up cases at a rate of knots.

A second series, coming soon to BBC One, was inevitable – in fact, a third was announced shortly after this interview – though after the series one finale, John is no longer posing as his brother. Instead, he’s joining the police as a “crime scene consultant” on the understanding he keeps quiet about his earlier misdeeds.

“The device that we’d been using of nobody knowing who he was – we had to let go of that,” Brotherhood says, “and then excitingly move forward with that information out there, which has worked really well.”

There are also some new faces in Cambridge nick. In an odd mirror to Ludwig’s success, two of the first run’s junior officers have become overnight successes in their own right – Izuka Hoyle recently headlined Sky’s thriller Prisoner, while Gerran Howell is playing American in the smash-hit medical drama The Pitt. Enter new DCs Ben Ashenden and Rumi Sutton, who are in the dark about the John/James switch. More newbies include Line of Duty’s Mark Bonnar as a newspaper editor and Fleabag’s Sian Clifford as a politician – “two exciting names,” as Brotherhood puts it.

Not that everything’s changed, of course. “The mystery remains,” says Brotherhood. “His brother is still missing. Lucy still needs his help, and he’s still actively looking for him without telling the police.” And the central puzzle-based murders still take centre stage, with early episodes involving a simple double-bluff game and a complex puzzle based on the patterns of moving gears that has Mitchell’s detective stumped.

“We like to see it as it’s not that the murders are handily forming into a puzzle, it’s that the bloke who’s investigating them converts crimes into puzzles, and solves them that way,” Brotherhood offers.

He laughs. “That being said, there’s still quite a lot of murders in Cambridge that seem to be connected to puzzles, which is a bit weird…”