Ludwig’s clues to the answers we long for

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, we will be rewarded.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

Two TV characters, a man and a woman, stand in front of a crossword cover walls of a room.

Anna Maxwell Martin, David Mitchell.

BBC.

The BBC have scored a bingeable hit with new comedy-drama Ludwig, starring David Mitchell as a maladroit puzzle-setter who is roped into a rather fabulous whodunnit. It involves his missing twin, a police detective whom he must impersonate in order to chase the trail of the disappearance. While on the case he solves a few other conundrums, giving the show many intriguing, if knotty, narrative threads.

It is not the first-time crossword setting and detective work have gone hand in hand. One of the very first cryptic crossword setters - the ‘grandfather’ of the genre - was Edward Powys Mathers, who also dashed off a mystery thriller, Cain’s Jawbone in 1934. The novel was provided to readers in the wrong order, with the simple but infuriating challenge to reconstruct the right sequence of pages based on maddeningly subtle internal clues. Despite offers of a cash prize, virtually no solutions were submitted.

Such is the dilemma of a cryptic crossword setter - when is clever too clever? Puzzles can appeal so much to our pride; our desire to be part of an ‘in-group’ which understands the highbrow references to opera, Latin oratory, and cricket slang. Those who can outwit them are part of an elite rank. The Telegraph crossword of 13th January 1942 was used as an exercise to recruit for the ENIGMA codebreaking unit. Indeed, when Mathers all but invented the idea of a fully cryptic crossword in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in 1924, his challenges bore the banner ‘Crosswords for Supermen’.

There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

I’ve often started out on a cryptic crossword, hoping to discover that I am one such genius, only to bitterly give up shortly afterwards, irritated that I don’t have that instant ability to see the solutions. I stare at the riddle, wanting to be one of those people who can naturally recall information, connect ideas, or see what has been hidden in the tortuous clue. Surely the appeal of a show like Ludwig is that it gives us an aspirational glimpse at the peak of human mental prowess, even if Mitchell’s wannabe inspector is a little socially awkward. He still possesses a penetrating gaze that looks through the surface of things, to see what no one else can. He is one of those ‘supermen’ - beholden to no one, able to uniquely see the way things are all by himself.

And yet, when Edward Powys Mathers died in 1939, he was referred to in his Observer obituary not as a kind of lone snobby genius, but “the gentlest of men… a saint”. It’s appropriate, as crosswords have long been a curiously churchy phenomenon: in the small list of great UK cryptic writers, two have been Anglican priests (Revd John Graham, known as Acaucaria, and Revd Canon A. F. Ritchie, or Afrit). Even Mathers’ fondness for Biblical allusions in his clues “led many to endow him with ecclesiastical rank” as Roger Millington’s book on Crosswords put it. Christian faith, because it is a religion built on the idea that God is with us in flesh, invites us to pay attention to the world around us. The world is not something to escape from, but is rather the place that, in Jesus Christ, God has come to meet us in. It makes you want to understand time, place, and culture, to better understand the God who has spoken through them, and given them meaning and destiny. In reference to this way of seeing things, Mathers was spoken of as a ‘catholic’ thinker in his obituary. This did not mean his church affiliation, but rather an instinct for seeing how everything is part of a greater whole. There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

There is also a negative hint in this obituary clue, ‘catholic’. Crossworders work under a nom de plume (David Mitchell’s character John for instance, who goes by ‘Ludwig’). And while Mathers was indeed a generous, open-minded man, he sealed his reputation for difficulty by adopting the pseudonym ‘Torquemada’, in reference to a former Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. So, if Christians are alive to the interconnectedness of all things, we also have a reputation for the institutional guarding of those very mysteries. History shows believers have tortured those who do not come to their idea of what the answer is; indeed, they have set the questions for too long, in the eyes of many hostile to the faith.

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded.

But this is the tension that crosswords offer us - a very authentically Christian way to think about the way God spells things out for us which does not rely on a stark binary of ‘true’ or ‘false’. He reveals things like a puzzle; slowly, and cryptically. Some might fairly object to this comparison, on the grounds this would make God too ‘out there’ - far away from the intimate father that Jesus bids us address so familiarly. Does it make God too remote and enigmatic to say he is setting riddles for us? But actually, a puzzle does not deceive us, like a mask does. Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded. The answer is there, reaching out to us, if we only commit ourselves humbly to receiving it. It may cost us much effort and time. It may require us to learn things afresh. But this is part of the joy of trying to see, as St Paul puts it, "the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things”.

Jesus himself spoke in parables, very much like cryptic clues. But this was no elitism, designed to cut out those without the high IQ of David Mitchell’s ‘Ludwig’. Arrogant intellect or love of one’s own status is, for Jesus, just as much a bar to those seeking a solution, because to find the answer requires a certain submission - a discipline - to see things as the puzzle-setter sees them. If we proceed only to do things our way, we remain blind: seeing we do not see, and hearing we do not hear, nor do we understand.

Article

Culture

Death & life

Digital

Easter

17 April 2025

4 min read

Do you have a right to be remembered?

Our desire to be in control might not survive our demise.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

A composite show a smiling woman next to a small illustrate of someone walking off into the distance.

Kristyna Squared.one on Unsplash .

“Madam, those that are about to die salute you.”

Words attributed to Roman captives and criminals fated to die before the emperor, were used (ironically) by Councillor Kieron Mallon at the last Council meeting of this term of Oxfordshire County Council last week. ‘Madam’ was the Council’s Chair, wishing everyone well. Elections are on the way.

Easter is also on the way, and in the period leading up to the commemoration of the resurrection of Christ from the dead, nearly 2,000 years ago, Christians are invited to think about their own mortality. ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return’ were words my priest intoned to me as he marked a cross with ashes on my forehead on 5 March, Ash Wednesday.

Ash already emblemizes a belief in rebirth, even before the power of the story of the Christ’s resurrection is considered. I for one felt immensely hopeful on Ash Wednesday this year. Having just secured a new place to call home, and one year into my job as Democratic Services Officer to Oxfordshire County Council, looking after the likes of Councillor Mallon, life felt pretty swell.

My priest and I spoke about the ways in which death and hope are joined at the hip. The ancient Greeks believed that a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of the one before it. So do we. I have found myself, so far this year, visiting people and places I strongly associate with former lives, from friends I lived with as an undergraduate to a town I went on holiday as a child to the beach where my late Granny’s ashes were scattered. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

More specifically, the Christian believes that ‘whoever loses their life for [Christ’s] sake will find it’, in the sense that true self-discovery arises when we let go of the ego, when we allow ourselves to be changed. Thinking about mortality, therefore, changes life, in so far as we are better equipped to surrender and salute the Saviour. That worldview has shaped public servants in years gone-by.

An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten.

I recently heard Dr Ian McGilchrist, the psychiatrist, describe the desire to control everything in life as the ‘besetting sin’ of the age in which we live. The desire to be remembered, rather than reborn, captures it better in my mind. Mankind has always wanted to remain in control. Souls will always be reluctant to surrender. However, what we have now is a world in which people feel uniquely entitled to make impact.

People feel that they have a right to be remembered, but it is not so. An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten. Moreover, the past can be especially compelling when we have a window into a world in which people did not necessarily expect to make any kind of worldly impact whatsoever. Theirs was a happier place.

The twentieth century was described by Philip Rieff in 1966 in terms of the ‘Triumph of the Therapeutic’. He wrote, ‘Religious man was born to be saved’, but ‘psychological man is born to be pleased.’ ‘Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going’. Therapy enables that objective. But therapy to what end?

Counselling can be construed as a device to regain control. The counselled, if fixed, can go about trying to change the world, trying to make an impact, resuming the rather pleasing but never-ending mission to be remembered. For anyone of a religious sensibility, however, that is not the objective. Rather, new life is given only for the whole resurrection story in our own lives to be repeated.

Around the time that Rieff wrote his book, the historian Herbert Butterfield, a Christian, wrote this. ‘Those who lived when the world was static – when the silhouette of the ploughman against the horizon hardly changed in the passage of a thousand years – may have something to teach us, who only know a breathless, rapidly changing world and who seem to be having to pluck what we can from life while running at full speed.’

Social media has surely exacerbated this condition because it connects us to others at the cost of contemplation about what life – and death – really entails. It is a place where we try to evidence to others the impact we are having, where we write our own eulogies and our own epitaphs and have access to the whole world whom we expect to read the same.

Life changes to a much greater extent these days, in this place, than it did for the ploughman in the passage of a thousand years, or captives and criminals in the Roman world, including Jesus Christ who was identified as one such. However, if we can somehow create conditions to focus less on having impact in and on a volatile world, and being someone who ought to be remembered, we will find that we have more hope.

In turn, we will change the world for the better, but despite ourselves, and for me that is what this period leading up to Easter is all about. We may find that others who are about to die salute us too, for the good deeds we have done that may well be forgot.

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