Ludwig, the Guardian’s genius new crossword setter

New names appear rarely above the grids of the Guardian’s cryptic crosswords, so the arrival of “Ludwig” set off theories in solvers’ minds. Might this be a new name for a long-established setter? A collaboration, perhaps to mark some musical anniversary?

At the same time, the in-character face of David Mitchell was appearing more frequently in social feeds and onscreen trails. The character is BBC One’s John “Ludwig” Taylor, a puzzle setter (and investigator of murders) never known to leave a coincidence unexamined. Could this itself be a coincidence?

It could not. Over the past year, when not editing the Guardian’s crosswords, I’ve had a “job” called “puzzle consultant” for the whodunnit series. I presumed this was because of the affectionate ear-bashing administered in these pages to a puzzle in a film from the same production company: Hot Fuzz, which has a prop newspaper with a truly preposterous crossword (see left). A grid with more black squares than white: honestly!

I presumed wrongly. The Ludwig team wanted all the prop puzzles to be the real thing. If we see Ludwig at his workstation dreaming up a futoshiki the old-fashioned way, they said, that puzzle should have all its 1s to 5s in the right places. So it was that I started to think like Ludwig, or as close as I could.

And, I wondered: since Ludwig would certainly be a Guardian setter, what would his puzzles be like? One might have an astronomy theme, I figured, and the clues might be among the more demanding seen in these pages. So I assembled something close, described the as-yet-unbroadcast programme to the setter Enigmatist and asked if he might collaborate on making it all more … Ludwigesque. He got it. Thinking like a genius turned inadvertent sleuth turns out to be second nature to Enigmatist.

I hope that Ludwig will return to the Guardian, possibly even showing us his softer side, but he’s apparently preoccupied with an extraordinarily high homicide rate in the Cambridge area. And extra marks if you spot the astronomy puzzle on screen.

Another Guardian fictional setter: Sphinx AKA Steve Pemberton
Q&A with Enigmatist AKA John Henderson
Ludwig review

And in our cluing conference: many thanks for your clues for SHANGHAI. The runners-up are Dunnart’s cryptic definition “Do this with a pinch of salt?” and Notgethithatonharry’s double definition “City railroad”; the winner is Montano’s devious “Force Seaman to sign for City”.

These posts will now appear fortnightly. Please leave entries below for our next challenge: from Ludwig’s puzzle, how would you clue STOKES?