Puzzled

by David Astle

  Perform on a bedspread (5)

  Keeping to the charade recipe, the clue leads to DO + ON + A = DOONA (which is Australian slang for ‘duvet’). At drafting stage I’d tried for a tone somewhere between risqué and ribald. Or I should say my version of risqué and ribald, as, in the end, the solver will be the judge. The best you can expect as a compiler is that your stuff entertains the majority. Aunt Mavis might throw her paper across the room, or take up arms in the letters page, but for every Mavis in the world there is, one hopes, an Agatha and a John, a Chloe and a Lachlan, getting a grin and coming back next week.

  Sex is the humid air we breathe. Just ask Madame Bovary, literature’s finest adulteress. Even her letters own a sleazy charade vibe, with MAD (bonkers) + AM (morning, or live) + EB (or BE backwards, hence to live up?) + OVARY. Not there yet, but the lewdness is tantalising.

  ADULTERESS too has plenty of legs, puzzle-wise. ADUL is a blend of DUAL, opening the way for an anagram with the right signpost – dual romp? With E – middle of bed? – covered in hair (or TRESS) the climax …

  I’ve already jotted down both of these ideas, the raw makings of future puzzles, which is how we clue-mongers operate. We live for hidden kinks in names and phrases, and should those kinks murmur boudoir business, then that’s no bad thing.

  Like AMATEUR, a word I clued ten years ago. There it was – A MATE with YOUR other half. True to the French, the whole means lover. With all these overlaps, the clue had to be:

  Lover, a sex partner with your other half (7)

  No paper is immune. Who’d ever suspect a Times compiler could channel the spirit of Mills & Boon when clueing PETROLEUM? But he or she did:

  Crude caress with part hesitation (9)

  ‘Oh Fabio, stop it, please, you’ll ruin me! Your caress (PET) with part (ROLE) hesitation (UM) is so damnably crude (PETROLEUM)!’

  In the same vein I once reduced CUBISM to a school of depravity:

  Copper faces sexual dilemma in art school (6)

  Can you see the poor officer’s crisis? There he is – CU, the chemical symbol for copper – facing the dilemma of BI (bisexual) or SM (sadomasochism). Certainly a bluer clue than average, one that Mavis and Chad may both resent, yet the cubist copper, just like the curvy cheerleader in our current clue, touch on an important issue.

  How far is too far when it comes to sexual subtext? What clue-approach will see most titters turn into outcry? If erotica, says novelist Isabel Allende, is using a feather, and pornography the whole chicken – then where does plume give way to poultry? And can we get coleslaw with that?

  WAYWARD SEX – gender bias and crasswords

  Researching racy clues, I recently dug up DUG. The word is archaic for breast, though this didn’t stop it from appearing in two separate crosswords. The first was a morsel from The Times, a bit of charade shenanigans:

  Dug light carrier (3,4)

  Here the synonym for light is RAY. Thus TEAT + RAY = TEA TRAY. Offensive? Hardly. Certainly no match for Rupert Bear with his meat and two veg.

  Further down the slippery slope, one English setter made reference to the Murdoch innovation of 1969, when the media baron propped up drooping Sun sales by adding topless girls to Page Three. Did sex sell? It did in 1969. As for the clue in question, its compiler settled on a louche pun, trying to invoke Polynesia with Dugout location (4,5), when all along the answer of course was PAGE THREE.

  But let’s stay for a moment with the Page Three concept, the buxom poppet and her al fresco assets. In many ways this dated custom captures that moment where sex mutates into sexism. I doubt whether Ximenes would escape public wrath these days with his (albeit brilliant) clue for HOUSEWIFE:

  I have most of the time to stitch – then I iron (9)

  Can you unpick the clue? Most of the time is almost all of HOUR. To stitch is SEW. Then I iron = I + FE (the chemical symbol again). Wrapped into one bundle, the wordplay also serves as the dubious definition, where the housewife is depicted as a dedicated seamstress and laundry-wallah. Scarcely a stereotype you can peddle in the new millennium, though the chauvinism pales in comparison with a storm created in Sydney twenty years ago thanks to an outrage sporting the fingerprints of one Lindsey Browne.

  It should be said, in order to set the scene fairly, that Lindsey was in his seventies by the time the clue appeared. Born in 1915, and setting crosswords since 1935, the bloke was the product of a less enlightened era when it comes to sexual equality. He was also an incurable punster, one day daring to the call the HEAVENLY HOST a dreamboat who throws good parties. As cheeky as that sounds, it wasn’t LB’s cardinal sin. That occurred in the late 1980s, when the issue of domestic violence seized the media. One phrase in particular caught the master’s eye, which he tackled in his clue:

  Pan-fried delicacies for criminals? (8,5)

  I won’t torment you. The answer is BATTERED WOMEN, and the backlash was savage. Calls came from victims, social workers and the judiciary, all condemning the clue’s perversion. Elspeth Browne, Lindsey’s wife, herself a social worker, was gobsmacked. ‘Lin,’ she said when the merde was flying, ‘whatever were you thinking?’

  Lindsey himself seemed mystified. Her husband, says Elspeth, kept wondering why people couldn’t see the ‘punny side’ of things. It’s a crossword clue, after all, he argued, a piece of entertainment, but the Herald saw it differently and published an apology.

  Ideally, once the dust had settled and a chastened LB had returned to his grids, that day would have marked an end to sexist clues, but no. As recently as 2004 I almost spat out my muesli when a Herald colleague – I won’t name him – thought the following clue was in good taste:

  Chick picked up by vacuum cleaner? (1,3,2,5)

  The answer, I realised with mounting dread, was A BIT OF FLUFF, a double-meaning clue and the kind you’d hope we’d left behind with the Model T. To echo Elspeth, ‘Mate, what were you thinking?’

  But is that the real problem? Are too many middle-aged men in charge of clues? If every setter is a whiskered cad bred on a diet of Biggles and Benny Hill, then no wonder such bigotry prevails. Yet such a notion is as wrong-headed as that of the all-sewing, all-ironing missus. Hugh Stephenson, the puzzle editor at the Guardian, recently did a headcount to learn that a third of his contributors are female, including Australia’s own Shirl O’Brien. Nearer home, three of the seven Fairfax setters are women. With a twinkle in the eye I tried to highlight this equality trend with a charade:

  Excellent to Ms, perhaps? (3–5)

  The answer is TOP-CLASS, or TO-PC-LASS, where the lasses of yesteryear are the Mses of today. A superior clue in a similar vein was crafted by Pasquale, the code name of prolific British compiler Don Manley. (You can tell when Manley is at the helm, as his bylines across numerous papers betray a notable Don, namely Quixote, Giovanni, Bradman or Duck.) Here’s his clue:

  Sexist description thus to upset females (3,5)

  This construction is a hybrid, combining the two recipes we’ve met already – anagram and charade. Sexist description is the definition. Upset the six letters in thus to and attach females (FF) to the tail and HOT STUFF emerges. The clue may be viewed as having your cake and eating it – getting away with a garish term as well as bewailing it – but I’m guessing that the combo of wordplay and social awareness delighted most who solved it.

  Unlike the clues of Cyclops, a setter who seems happiest when offending as many punters as possible. His puzzle runs in London’s satirical magazine Private Eye. The shock-proof solver must navigate such anagrams as SEX ON CUE (NO EXCUSE) and A MA’S BUTTER (MASTURBATE), while HELP CASTRATION, HO renders LANCASHIRE HOTPOT.

  Filth, in fact, is a cultish subgenre of puzzling. In 2008, over in America, Chronicle Books released a lewd book of brainteasers under the intriguing title of Where’s Dildo? Thumb the pages and you’ll find Wonderbras shaped into mazes, X-rated riddles and find-a-words teeming with WELL HUNG and WHISKEY DICK.

  But the cream of the salacious crop must be the Kama Sut
ra. Not the original Hindu manual for the bedroom arts, but two enigmatic variations. The first is a jigsaw, with 83 lovemaking positions shattered into a thousand pieces – the ideal honeymoon gift for puzzle nuts.

  The second incarnation outsold most novels during my stint at a Melbourne bookstore. A cartoon collection at first glance, the book depicted the heads of two lovers, each wearing a sublime grin. Scattered between them, like a Big Bang galaxy, was the dense array of a dot-to-dot puzzle. Contortion by numbers. Cue cheerleader.

  PLEASURE PRINCIPLE – the last charade and the oldest joy

  ‘Winning isn’t Everything – It’s the Only Thing.’ This is a tagline from Bring It On, a cheerleading movie that doesn’t need to join your bucket list. The film is a dance-off between the sassy San Diego gals and the hip-hopping plagiarists of East Compton. As for who wins, you’ll have to ask Tess, my tweenage daughter, as she’s the only one in the family to go the distance. But one line stuck with me: ‘It’s all about making the best moves.’

  Cheerleading and crosswording. One error and a charade will fall on its face. So bring it on, compiler. Let’s step it out:

  Early curve superb on cheerleader (7)

  Tellingly, cheerleader has next to zero synonyms. On top of that, just as circle signalled the O in OMAHA, or mid-April suggests R, a word like cheerleader is likely to indicate C, the leader of cheer.

  Thinking this way, you start to isolate the clue’s latter half as the wordplay element – a big leap forward in the solving stakes. The same theory also implies that your seven-letter answer ends in C. And what does the whole answer mean? Early? Or early curve? Which makes more sense?

  Early – exactly.

  Honouring the C-theory, and dashing out the letters we’ve gained from earlier answers, we now have this spread: A _ C _ A _ C. (Does any word fit?)

  Only one. And sweetly, this one word also means early – ARCHAIC. So let’s match the pieces to the words: ARCH (curve), AI (superb – as in A-1) and then your C for cheer. All right. We’ve solved 23-Down, our final charade. Give me an A – A! Give me an R – R! Give me … a break.

  By the way, beware that A-1 trick. Just like ANT in the last chapter, clued by worker, AI is a regular ruse. Any word for excellent can suggest the pairing, while fine often denotes OK. Notice too how the ‘one’ of A-1 morphs into a capital I when entering the grid, another piece of close magic, where numbers turn to letters before your eyes.

  As the setter, the moment I twigged that arch and cheerleader both embrace curve as a concept I knew I could splice wordplay and definition, lending a bit of match-day sizzle to the overall clue.

  Not that ARCHAIC isn’t sexy on its lonesome. English has precious few words ending in AIC, and rarities need our love. Sex, in fact, is as archaic as humankind, the mystery that brought us into being, and occasionally the analogy for solving a crossword.

  I kid you not. Regardless of style, compilers need to remember that the pleasure principle outweighs all other considerations. Charade or anagram, the moral dilemma plays second fiddle to the joy a smitten solver can find in the challenge.

  Take Dunn Miller, for example. A 64-year-old librarian from California, Ms Miller was irate when the Atlantic Monthly decided to withdraw its brilliant cryptic, known as the Puzzler. Constructed by the conjugal duo of Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, the Puzzler’s grid could be shaped to mimic a pinball machine, a goldfish bowl or a pirate map, depending on the month’s theme. When asked to describe the puzzle’s appeal, Dunn shocked the New York Times journo by replying, ‘You get the pleasure of solving each clue, so there’s the aha moment over and over – it’s like having multiple orgasms.’

  Some solvers can make a more direct link between wordplay and foreplay. Like the letter I received in 2009, days after sharing my puzzle passion on a radio show. The listener was a palindrome called Alamala, and she wasn’t backwards in coming forwards:

  I am one of a couple of cruciverbalists – that’s couple as in two people who snuggle up together over cryptic crossword puzzles. We’re evenly matched and complementary in that we have different areas of specialist interest. The satisfaction of this shared and cooperative intellectual activity brings us closer and excites our bodies via our minds. Usually we manage to finish at one go, but sometimes pen and puzzle are set aside for a more urgent activity. Sadly, I think this aspect of cruciverbalism has been overlooked. Please tell your guest setter he makes people happier in more ways that he might imagine!

  QUIZLING 7.1

  Charade-wise, what item of clothing is a narrow winning

  margin beside a shared win of no margin?

  BLUE CLUES

  Risqué is OK – till you cross the invisible line. How far is the envelope pushed by these five clues? The first two come from The Times, with Rufus and Paul (twice) of the Guardian bringing up the rear.

  Not easy being like Casanova after time = THORNY

  Coach possibly organised porn at strip club = PUBLIC

  TRANSPORT

  Stimulated to use a rod, perhaps? = AROUSED

  As such, female unlikely to bend over = FRIGID

  Swimmer giving bottom a good licking = SEA TROUT

  QUIZLING 7.2

  To reveal today’s mystical name, solve the four clues below,

  reverse your answers and link them together in the same

  sequence.

  Male offspring (3)

  Knack (3)

  Commercial (2)

  Aggregate (3)

  QUIZLING 7.3

  Keeping with curves, what are the only two foods spelt

  entirely with curved capital letters?

  (No brand names, please.)

  CHAPTER 8

  Cockney chaos going to stir green

  (7)

  To see him in a tuxedo was to make you look twice – his towering frame, that purple-dark skin, darker than the jacket cinching his torso. Maynard had grace. He used that spoon like an extension of his fingers, scooping up pumpkin wedges with ease, an upper spoon all the while poised to prevent the load from toppling.

  ‘Silver service’, Meredith called it. A stiff woman with gelled bob, Meredith sucked olive stones to deaden her smoking urge. But that was her only sloppiness. Everything else was military, her scissor-like gait, her terse instructions – less chatter, more wine, table four, water check. Rather than help, she liked to stalk the dining room to ask why the waiters weren’t helping enough.

  Look like a waiter and you’ll be a waiter, she said, but that was bollocks. Catching the tube that afternoon, dressed in tux with patent leather shoes, I felt more the secret agent. Even the stations – Baker Street, Charing Cross – had that movie déjà vu. Yet the minute I walked into the kitchen the aura evaporated as Meredith transfixed me with her eye.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t commute in your uniform.’

  ‘I thought it was OK.’

  ‘You’re wearing half of bloody London on your jacket.’

  This was my first gig with Dunford Catering, a dog-and-pony operation that hired backpackers with no fixed abode, and no National Insurance numbers. Meredith dabbed my jacket with a damp rag as she trotted out her favourite barb, ‘Just because you work in a zoo doesn’t mean you belong there.’

  When I first heard I’d be waiting tables at Regent’s Park Zoo I had monkeys in my mind, gibbons stealing avocado off the tray, but the room was a blank space of ten round tables with a low stage for ceremonies. The only hint of zoology was an idle howl from an open door or the faint smell of dung seeping through the air grilles.

  Yet the name alone was great for postcards. Hi Dad, you’ll never guess, I’m dressed up like a penguin in London Zoo. Aside from its tourist appeal, the zoo also had crossword kudos. Not that I told that to Meredith, the woman squaring my bow tie and telling me that excellence was a benchmark. But later, hearing a phone in the distance, I thought of all those calls in the past, in the early 1920s when crosswords first appeared in British papers. They were ‘Quicks’ back then,
the fad imported from America. Before too long the Brits were as hooked as their Yank cousins. Afternoons all over Britain were spent leafing through dictionaries, trying to find that last elusive word which all too often was an obscure animal.

  Brazilian aardvark (5)

  Camelopard (5)

  Madagascan bee-eater (6)

  Who knew the names of such offbeat fauna? Regent’s Park Zoo was who, the phone running hot as solvers hoped to fill their final corner, hunting COATI and OKAPI and HOOPOE respectively, until the zoo snapped and banned all puzzle enquiries. That’s right, this zoo, Regent’s Park, where I tried to balance a stewed pear on a spoon.

  ‘Wait a tick,’ came a voice. ‘You doin’ it all arsey-versey.’

  I turned around expecting to see some real-life version of Andy Capp, the cartoon Cockney with the fag on his lip, but standing there was Maynard, all 190 centimetres of him, and my pear went splat as a result. ‘No bovver,’ he smiled. ‘They grow on trees, don’t they?’

  I rescued the mess while Maynard went looking for two fresh spoons. ‘It ain’t easy first time, but soon you’ll do it wiv yer eyes shut.’

  ‘My benchmark is excellence,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, and my name’s fucken Santa Claus.’

  Despite seeming the most exotic of the waiting crew, Maynard was the sole Londoner. His parents came from Ghana and had settled down in Wapping on the Thames. We clicked straight away, faster than my spoons at any rate. The guy was a natural mentor, though I was a D-grade student and Meredith was on the warpath. The harder I tried to master silver service, clapping two spoons in a single hand, the more I resembled a lobster on Mogadon.

  First course was soup, thank God, a doddle aside from the dinner rolls. For all its advancements in engineering, Great Britain had yet to hear of tongs. Instead I used my spoons to pincer each roll, balancing the bread as the diners watched in a mix of amusement and dread. Meredith was just as nervous, looking on. Her job was to look for weak links and I was it. ‘What’s the story?’ she seethed in the kitchen. ‘The agency said you had waiting experience.’