Jonathan Creek: The Grinning Man is a feature-length episode of the BBC crime drama series Jonathan Creek, written and directed by series creator David Renwick, which marked the series' return to television following a five year hiatus, and saw the return of Alan Davies as the show's titular sleuth.
The central mysteries of the episode focus on an attic room where occupants disappeared without trace overnight, and the kidnapped partner of a stage magician.
The special aired in the UK on BBC One on 9 January, 2009. It is 135 minutes long.
The Grinning Man aired in South Africa on DStv's BBC Entertainment on Monday 20 December 2010, at 20h00.
Synopsis
Jonathan Creek returns, to explain a series of baffling disappearances in a "haunted" room at the house of a master illusionist...
At midnight on Midsummer's Day 1938, a famous Harvard geneticist, Eli Mencken, accepts a challenge to spend the night inside a gloomy old attic room... where the ghost of a madman is said to prey upon human flesh.
Next morning, he has impossibly vanished from the hermetically sealed chamber. The only clue to his disappearance is traces of grisly ectoplasm on the bed.
Seventy years on, the vast Gothic house known as Metropolis has passed into the hands of the original owner's daughter and her son, but the strange, unexplained events in "The Nightmare Room" continue...
When two young women take shelter there one night from a raging thunderstorm, it is not long before the ominius "presence" has claimed another victim.
Determined to get to the truth about what has happened to her friend, the fearlessly sceptical Joey Ross finds herself working alongside veteran lateral thinker Jonathan Creek, as together they embark on a complex, often dangerous, investigation into a mystery which only continues to deepen.
Who is behind the ingenious abduction of magician Lance Gessler's beautiful young assistant Elodie?
What secrets lie buried in the tomb of Gessler's sinister grandfather, the once-renowned spiritualist and psychic, Jacques Futrelle?
And above all, what strange unholy power resides in the grotesque old portrait of a grinning man that hangs on the attic wall?
Can Jonathan Creek once again shed light on the riddle and render the impossible possible? Or are his once formidable powers of deduction about to be eclipsed this time, by the sheer raw intuition of his younger counterpart...?