Recap / Jonathan Creek

Series One (1997)

1) "The Wrestler's Tomb"

• Mystery: An artist is found shot in his house, his latest lover tied up in the room with him, a gun discarded, and a window open. The evidence suggests that a thief robbed the house and shot the artist, but when the obvious suspect for the thefts provides an alibi, the artist's wife becomes a suspect.
• Solution: The model did it; she tied herself up and shot the artist with her feet.

2) "Jack in the Box"

• Mystery: An elderly comedian is found shot dead in a sealed underground bunker. It's clearly suicide, except the man was so arthritic he could barely peel a banana, let alone hold a gun.
• Solution: The comedian was murdered, but the killer had spent time in jail for killing the comedians first wife, it turns out the comedian paid him to do it, and the killer felt so guilty decided to kill the comedian and then himself, so they took an overdose of pills while bricking themselves up inside the wall of the bunker after carrying out the murder.

3) "The Reconstituted Corpse"

• Mystery: Maddy gets a new wardrobe, and after finally lugging it up to her flat, she opens it and a woman's body falls out, even though it was empty when it first arrived.
• Solution: The woman had been snooping around Maddy's flat because Jonathan and Maddy were investigating her for another crime. Trapped in the flat, she jumps into the wardrobe just as Maddy pushes it into the room. Earlier that day, she had been struck on the head by a falling piece of pipe which caused an aneurysm which kicked in after she climbed into the wardrobe.

4) "No Trace of Tracy"

• Mystery: A teenage girl is seen entering the house of a famous musician before vanishing. Earlier that day, the musician had been attacked and chained to a radiator facing the exact door the girl entered through, yet he claims he never saw her enter, only a strange frog.
• Solution: The musician had been kidnapped by a local hippie commune. While he was blacked out, they built an exact replica of the room from his house to chain him up in. Then they kidnapped the girl to frame him in order to scare off his fiancee, who was convincing him to stop sending them funding. The frog was a rare species they were keeping that hopped into the fake room.

5) "The House of Monkeys"

• Mystery: A man is found impaled with a sword through his back in his office, with the door locked from the inside.
• Solution: The man had been sent an envelope with a drug on the seal; when he licked it, he suffered violent hallucinations that led to him stabbing the sword into the desk, and when he tried to climb out of the window, he fell backwards onto the sword.

Series Two (1998)

1) "Danse Macabre"

• Mystery: An author is murdered in her own home by a masked man but her family manage to trap her killer and a hostage in the garage. When they open the garage door to confront him, the killer has completely vanished. Things get weirder when her corpse's head mysteriously vanishes days later...
• Solution: The author staged the whole thing with help from her family as an elaborate form of suicide/euthanasia. The masked accomplice kills her, and in the chaos the hostage and the killer swap outfits and use a dummy in place of the hostage so that the killer can vanish without a trace. Well-meaning family members, who weren't in on the plan, trapped them in the garage forcing the hostage to improvise by cutting the dummy into pieces and stashing them in buckets at the back of the garage before changing costume and taking her place as the "victim". The author's head was stolen by a Loony Fan in an unrelated incident.

2) "Time Waits for Norman"

• Mystery: A man has apparently been seen at two different sides of the Atlantic less than an hour apart, by independent, reliable witnesses.
• Solution: The man technically shared his identity with an old friend. His current job offered a large enough salary for two, work in Britain and America, and he had an obsession with time, so he and his friend alternated duties for the company in Britain and America, allowing them each to pursue other interests with their spare time.

3) "The Scented Room"

• Mystery: A priceless painting disappears from its gallery in the few seconds it takes for the visiting tour groups to exchange places.
• Solution: One of the girls in the first group stayed behind in the gallery, hiding behind the door. She then took the painting and hid it inside the paneling of the double-thickness door. When the next group entered, she mingled with them to make it look like she was with them all along.

4&5) "The Problem at Gallows Gate (Parts 1 & 2)"

• Mystery: A man commits suicide, only to come back from the dead to be witnessed strangling the woman who rejected him.
• Solution: The man's "suicide" was an elaborate (and very poor-taste) prank involving a hidden trampoline and a fake ambulance to get back at the woman for hooking up with his best friend. However, by the time he resurfaced the woman and the best friend had fallen out badly - so badly in fact that the "strangling" was actually an attempt to prevent her from committing suicide by overdose. The woman was murdered by her jealous housemate, who had come to despise both of them and wanted to frame the man for her murder.

6) "Mother Redcap"

• Mystery: A judge mysteriously dies in the night, and it is somehow connected to a "haunted" pub where anyone looking out the back window died of fright.
• Solution: The pub was actually an elaborate trap set up by the landlord to punish unfaithful men; when they entered the room with their lady friend and took their shoes off, the landlord would activate a device that pushed metal rods into the soles of their feet and then electrocute them to death. The judge's killer was inspired by this and rigged the judge's alarm clock to electrocute him when he pressed the snooze button.

Christmas Special (1998)

1. "Black Canary"

• Mystery: A woman apparently shot herself in the snow outside her house after talking to an unknown man with a limp, but when her husband went out to investigate, there was no sign of footprints from the other man.
• Solution: The victim had been killed hours earlier, and the suicide had been staged by the real killer as an alibi, using mirrors. The victim had actually committed suicide by overdose even earlier, over guilt at taking over her twin sister's life 15 years previously after she was killed in a stage accident.

Series Three (1999-2000)

1) "The Curious Tale of Mr Spearfish"

• Mystery: Mr. Spearfish claims to have made a deal with the devil, and a number of supernatural occurrences seem to support this.
• Solution: Spearfish's wife is actually related to the British Royal Family, and his reckless antics after the "deal" threatened to cause problems. MI5 intervened, causing what appeared to be spectacular good luck (such as a hitman seeming to drop dead for no reason - he was actually being tasered by a hidden operative in the bushes)

2) "The Eyes of Tiresias"

• Mystery: A businessman is murdered in his office, but an old lady reveals she dreamt about his death in very precise and accurate detail days earlier.
• Solution: The businessman actually committed suicide, but wanted to frame a rival. He recorded the sounds of a break-in and attack, but the original recording (which was on a CD) was stolen in a random burglary. The old lady unknowingly bought the stolen CD from the market, fell asleep while listening and had the entire event play out in her dream.

3) "The Omega Man"

• Mystery: A UFO expert challenges Jonathan to prove how a so-called alien fossil could have vanished while under armed guard.
• Solution: The fossil was actually a sculpture made from solid mercury, explaining how it freeze-burned a soldier who touched it with bare hands. When the soldiers loaded it into the truck, the heat caused it to melt into a special recess in the base.

4) "Ghosts Forge"

• Mystery: A wizened old man is found dead in an oddly-named Big Fancy House. So why does a middle-aged man keep having nightmares about it?
• Solution: The old man didn't live in the house, rather he was a burglar who used his abused niece as a distraction so he could rob the place. The real owner of the house was the middle-aged man who, despite being wealthy from ghostwriting, was still mourning the wife who died when they where both young. The niece, having grown sick of her uncle's abuse, murdered him and took advantage of some Easy Amnesia to build a new life with the middle-aged man, accidentally overwriting his identity in the process. The nightmares where just Amnesiac Resonance.

5) "Miracle in Crooked Lane"

• Mystery: A celebrity dies in an explosion, leaving no doubt she is dead. So how come an old lady in the next village swears blind that she spoke to her hours later?
• Solution: It wasn't hours later. The old lady's carer had been gaslighting her to confuse her about what time it really was, all so she would provide an air-tight alibi for a murder he planned to commit.

6) "The Three Gamblers"

• Mystery: A vicious gangster is killed in a dispute held in an out of the way shack. When the others return later, they find his corpse has somehow climbed up the stairs and clawed its way through the door.
• Solution: The basement of the shack flooded after they left, lifting the body to the top of the stairs before the waters receded again. The body's fingers just happened to pass through a hole at the bottom of the rotting door.

Christmas Special (2001)

1. "Satan's Chimney"

• Mystery: An actress is shot during the filming of her latest film. She was alone in a room with one door and a window, but the window was unbroken, the rain outside was so heavy that it would have left the room wet if it had been opened, and the door was watched by other parties since she was left inside. In an apparently unrelated incident a world-renowned escape artist vanishes without a trace from a castle said to deliver sinners and heretics straight to hell, only to turn up dead a day later in an apparent suicide.
• Solution: The door was broken with an axe as part of the story; a gun was hidden in the axe and the man wielding it fired the gun as he was breaking down the door. This was all masterminded by the escape artist who wanted to punish the actress for aborting his child - and manipulated the actress's given-up-for-adoption son into pulling the trigger. Several of the staff on the movie set found out about this and killed him by crushing him beneath the castles' drawbridges' counterweight.

Series Four (2003-2004)

1) "The Coonskin Cap"

• Mystery: A serial killer is strangling young women while wearing the titular Coonskin Cap. When a policewoman tries to track her down in a school gym, she is killed too, except the gymnasium was surrounded by police, so how did the killer get in and out without being seen?
• Solution: The serial killer had nothing to do with it and they weren't wearing a cap but rather had their bushy hair tied back in a ponytail. A jealous colleague rigged the policewoman's flak jacket to expand and crush her chest. Using a sighting of the killer as a pretense to lure her out, he then trapped her in the gym and activated the device remotely.

2) "Angel Hair"

• Mystery: A music producer finds evidence that his mistress was faking a kidnapping to get money off him. The ransom video shows that the kidnappers cut off all her hair. But then he sees her again after the video was recorded, and her hair has completely grown back in a matter of hours.
• Solution: The ransom tape wasn't a recording; it was actually a live feed. The kidnapping had been staged by the housekeeper in order to drive away the mistress by making her look like a gold digger, and it took place after the music producer had seen her that day.

3) "The Tailor's Dummy"

• Mystery: A fashionista jumps to his death from an upstairs window, but he wasn't suicidal, so why did he do it?
• Solution: The fashionista was blind, and a family member mocked up the sounds of a fire and his family imploring him to jump to safety (implying they were waiting to catch him.) The recording was set to go off while all the family were out, and the man panics and unknowingly jumps to his doom.

4) "The Seer of the Sands"

• Mystery: A man dies in a reckless accident despite apparently receiving the good news of his lover finally being separated from her ex husband and his body disappears. His lover is comforted by two Gypsy mystics who seem to be able to commune with his spirit.
• Solution: A small fly landed on a letter in precisely the wrong spot, making the man think he had been rejected by his lover. His body was stolen by a Loony Fan while the Gypsies were part of an elaborate scheme to influence the lover's business decisions, the highlight of which would be passing a note through a length of pipe to make it appear it had been buried hours beforehand.

5) "The Chequered Box"

• Mystery: A man dies of sleep apnea in a locked room while a hotshot detective is photographed smirking at a still-hanging murder victim. Complicating things, he and his daughter seem to have a dire contract with a "Mister G.".
• Solution: The events were an elaborate revenge plot by an East End gangster against the detective and the key participants in his conviction; the sleep apnea was suffocation dressed up to look like natural causes, the photographs were staged by use of a temporary divider, a tipped-off press photographer at just the right angle and a well-placed cartoon to catch the attention of the detective. The contract was simply the detective using his strong Christian faith to keep his daughter out of drug problems.

6) "Gorgons Wood"

• Mystery: A statue vanishes from an isolated room while being watched by the museum owner.
• Solution: The statue was replaced with a fake made using a recipe for an edible toy.

Specials (2009-2013)

1. "The Grinning Man"

• Mystery: A room in an old mansion causes everyone who sleeps in it to vanish without a trace. Meanwhile a woman is witnessed being murdered, but is recorded the next day in a completely different part of the country.
• Solution: The room was an elaborate deathtrap that dumped its victims into an old water tank to drown when they took a bath. The recording of the woman was faked ahead of time with the crucial evidence, the front page of the town's newspaper, being planned ahead of time by the editor of the paper.

1. "The Judas Tree"

• Mystery: A house disappears from a grassy field. An Egyptian servant predicts the death of her employer to the minute. A woman names her housekeeper as her attacker after being thrown through a window, but the housekeeper swears her innocence.
• Solution: The house was a film set that blew over in the wind. The Egyptian servant had placed a fragile vial of hydrogen cyanide inside her employer's pocket watch and screamed at just the right time to break the glass. The housekeeper was framed; the murder victim was actually a friend of hers while the woman who accused her faked her own death. She did this as revenge for the murder of her husband's younger brother by the housekeeper and her friend.

1. "The Clue of the Savant's Thumb"

• Mystery: A schoolgirl is found dead with a mysterious circular symbol on her forehead, a dying man is murdered and his body vanishes from a locked room and, curiously, his keyboard hasn't got a mark on it.
• Solution: The symbol was the result of a hazing ritual for a gang of neo-pagans; a jar full of bees was pressed against the forehead leaving sting marks and a red ring. Tragically, the girl was allergic and died during the hazing. The man's death was an accident, when a chainsaw malfunctioned and decapitated him in the family barn. His panicked children, worried that it may be mistaken for murder, move the head to his office and construct a dummy from stuffed clothes to stage a disappearance. The man's head is hidden in an office globe while the dummy is thrown out of the window and hidden before the police arrive.

Except... the man's death may not have been an accident. He had, in conjunction with a production company, created a fake recording of a scandalous backroom deal involving current politicians for a tv show, only for a well-meaning friend to mistake it for real, describe it to a well-connected friend down the club, and have a pair of deniable-asset agents assigned to the "problem".

Series Five (2014)

1) "The Letters of Septimus Noone"

• Mystery: A dancer is found in her locked dressing room with a horrific stab wound to the stomach, yet moments earlier her manager had seen her with her stomach exposed and perfectly fine.
• Solution: The woman had been stabbed before the show began, but not taking the wound seriously and desperate to perform, she had an assistant cover her in latex skin. By the time she returned to the dressing room and took the latex off, the wound had gotten so bad she almost bled out.

2) "The Sinner and the Sandman"

• Mystery: How did a infamously-terrible stage magician manage to predict winning lottery numbers thirty years on advance? What is the great beast roaming the village at night and who is the mysterious "Sandman" who keeps haunting Polly's dreams?
• Solution: The prediction wasn't; rather a builder just needed somewhere to write down two phone numbers for a local couple called Wilfred and Willimenia and the result was a massive coincidence. The beast was a nosy local reporter and the Sandman was just a vet who put down her pet rabbit.

3) "The Curse of the Bronze Lamp"

• Mystery: How did the watch from a kidnapped woman end up in the bed of Jonathan and Polly's new cleaner?
• Solution: The watch had been placed inside a balloon (the woman had been kidnapped while setting up a party) and weighed down with a pair of stockings as a distress signal. By chance, the cleaner happened to be walking under the balloon at the time it broke and the watch got brought home with her in her clothing.

Christmas Special (2016)

1) "Daemons' Roost"

• Mystery: A woman witnesses her lover being cast across the room into a fiery portal, seemingly by an evil sorceror.
• Solution: The woman woke up in a cage turned 90 degrees. What she witnessed was the man falling from the ceiling into a furnace. The "evil sorceror" was actually an elaborate puppet.