Houdini meets whodunnit.

Episodes One and Two – The Wrestler’s Tomb

Contemporary expressionist painter Hedley Shale is found murdered with two bullets in his chest in the upstairs bedroom at his South London home, eccentrically named The Wrestler’s Tomb. Lying nearby is his secret lover, French model Francesca Boutron – bound and gagged by the black-hooded intruder who shot the artist at point-blank range and then escaped through the back garden. Shale’s wife, Serena, steely editor of a national women’s magazine, would, by all laws of logic, appear to be the killer.

But she was at work throughout the morning on her side of town. Her PA watched her office at 9:30 and then remained outside the door for the next three hours. For Serena Shale to have left the room by any other means was quite simply a physical impossibility. So how could she have committed the crime?

With time-honoured efficiency, detectives snap into action and arrest the wrong man – prompting Maddy Magellan to begin an investigation that will hopefully prevent a gross miscarriage of justice. But how can Serena Shale’s apparently impregnable alibi be broken? Enter Jonathan Creek – outwardly taciturn and cynical, he is twilight to Maddy’s daylight, his brooding intensity often at odds with her impetuous zeal.Yet, together, they become drawn ever deeper into the impossible puzzle of Hedley

Shale’s murder; a puzzle to which the solution proves far more bizarre and chilling than they could ever have imagined.

Episode Three – Jack in the Box

Former film star Jack Holiday was a lot of laughs in the ‘50s,‘60s and ‘70s. But times – and comedy – have moved on. Today, the only outlet for his slapstick skills is a TV commercial for bananas. Or is it? Could that really be 65-year-old Jack on screen executing those pratfalls, when his body and hands are apparently now crippled with arthritis? More to the point, when he is discovered dead in a locked nuclear bunker with a gun beside his head, surely it would have been impossible for him to have pulled the trigger? An ingenious murder, then. But how did the killer leave the concrete shelter, located 30ft underground inside a rock-face of solid granite, through a steel-plated door that could only have been locked form the inside?

Episode Four – The Reconstituted Corpse

At 43, Zola Zbzewski has the sort of looks many women can only dream of. For the past 10 years, she has spent many thousands of pounds on an intensive course of facelifts, implants, tucks, bobs and dermabrasions to transform herself. For many years, the man who performed all these operations, cosmetic surgeon David Curchin, also shared her bed. But he has now been cast aside in favour of a younger model – a hunky, Swedish swimming instructor named Rudi. Curchin vows to destroy her when Zola decides to go public with an account of their relationship, but it is Curchin who is destroyed and brutally murdered at his Harley Street clinic in the middle of the night. Zola becomes an immediate suspect, as no-one else has a stronger motive to kill him. Fortunately, investigative journalist Maddy Magellan is soon on top of the case, uncovering startling new evidence to blow the charges away. But the unexpected and totally impossible happens,and there is only one man to whom they can turn to shed light on the baffling affair.

Episode Five – No Trace of Tracy

Roy Pilgrim is a living legend. Former lead singer and electric violinist with the rock band Edwin Drood, he is still idolised by female fans the world over. But when one of them,16-year-old Tracey Cook,turns up at his country house to meet the great man and apparently vanishes into thin air, the police are clearly faced with a problem. Was she, in fact, abducted… or worse? Is she even still alive? Or has a fate too grisly for words befallen her – a fate for which pop icon Pilgrim would almost certainly appear to be responsible? Once again, the winning team of crime writer Maddy Magellan and magical associate Jonathan Creek is drawn into another totally impossible problem. It’s one that takes them deep into the murky world of rock and roll – and even murkier goings-on in the nearby woods.

Episode Six – The House of Monkeys

When nationally renowned doctor and cancer researcher Elliot Strange is discovered dead inside a locked room, impaled on a 12th-century Samurai blade, the authorities are understandably baffled. Since nobody could possibly have got into the study and nobody could have got out – and the other occupants in the house at the time of the murder were a dozen pet monkeys – perhaps Dr Strange did, indeed, somehow engineer his own suicide. But why? And why was he heard, seconds before his death, screaming in mortal terror – like a man possessed? Within hours of the crime, Elliot’s wife, Ingrid, has summoned family friend Jonathan Creek to the scene, in the hope that his lateral brain will bring reason to the whole bizarre affair. But the closer he and Maddy are drawn to the problem, the more impossible becomes the solution. When dusk descends, and they find themselves spending the night in this dark house of mysteries, the night begins.