Murder Most Puzzling is a less charming version of Ludwig ...Middle East

Here’s a teaser to get you started. Can you name a whodunnit about an eccentric sleuth whose flair for creating confounding puzzles makes them the perfect crime-buster? It reads like the back-of-the-envelope pitch for David Mitchell’s BBC hit Ludwig, but it is also the broad strokes idea behind 5’s Murder Most Puzzling in which Downton Abbey’s Phyllis Logan inherits the Mitchell mantel, playing a puzzle wiz on the trail of a serial killer.

I can’t accuse Murder Most Puzzling of being a complete rip-off, since it is adapted from a pre-existing sequence of crime novels by American author Parnell Hall. But at the same time, it’s hard not to conclude that the success of the BBC series has convinced 5 that there might be something to this puzzler-catches-the-criminals premise.

Sadly, this undercooked and meandering adaptation confirms that a good idea is of little use if the execution is both dull and dashed-off. The first problem is that “Puzzle Lady” Cora Felton (Logan) is far too broadly drawn for what is a rather dark tale of a serial killer murdering young women in the fictional village of Bakerbury.

She’s a two-dimensional, nosy neighbour type, who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Agatha Christie mystery. Logan’s cheery performance is a poor fit for what is otherwise a relatively grounded tale of death stalking the English countryside, with the killer leaving the bodies of his victims in a graveyard with a line from a crossword puzzle teasingly attached.

Cora regards the entire thing as a lark – which might work if the other characters were depicted in the same two-dimensional fashion. Her dormouse-like niece and assistant Sherry (Charlotte Hope), for example, is far more grounded. Instead, the script plays it largely straight, making Felton stand out like a crossword buff at a Sudoku convention.

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A plot twist halfway through goes some way towards explaining Felton’s over-the-top behaviour. But that then just leads to further questions regarding her crime-solving abilities – and her assistant’s comparative uselessness at the same.

Then there is the absurd idea that Felton’s genius for crossword setting has made her a national star – her celebrity amplified further by her endorsing a popular biscuit line. It’s all quite ludicrous; since when is a talent for puzzles a passport to the big time? In Ludwig, Mitchell convincingly played a natural-born recluse for whom puzzles were a way of opting out of the drama of human connection. Felton, by contrast, is presented as an A-lister – somewhere between David Beckham and a Strictly winner. It’s a concept simply too farfetched to swallow.

The supporting cast seems torn between the two leading performances – Logan’s broad-strokes Jessica Fletcher routine and Hope’s grittier turn. As Detective Chief Inspector Derek Hooper, Adam Best is bumbling one moment and angsty the next. Likewise, pesky local reporter Anton Grant (Alistair Brammer) shifts halfway through from being a muckraking hack with an ambivalent relationship with the truth to a hunky love interest. The only one who does well with the limited material is former Dancing with the Stars Ireland contestant Yasmin Seky, who has bundles of charisma playing a manipulative solicitor.

Adding to the confusion is the unexplained accents. Bakerbury is seemingly tucked away in a sleepy corner of the English countryside, but Murder Most Puzzling was filmed in Northern Ireland, which is presumably why several characters have random Belfast-adjacent accents.

In its defence, the solution to the central murder mystery is well thought through and difficult to predict. But it is too little, too late for a programme that, despite its literary origins, never amounts to much beyond a ham-handed Ludwig pastiche, minus the comedic charm. Sorry to say, it puts the “Zzzzzz” in puzzle.

‘Murder Most Puzzling’ continues next Thursday at 8pm on 5

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