Puzzled
Page 17
A habit is a hard thing to get rid of. Take away the H, and you’ve still got a bit. Take away the A, and the bit’s still there. Take away the B, and you’ve still got it. Take away the I [point to self], and you’ve got it down to a t.
That’s the principle – less is the key. When BLAIR loses face, so to speak, the former British leader becomes LAIR, a beast’s home. (Bizarre when you consider another PMEDEN – does the very same thing.)
Deletions encourage striking, though not the sort that PMs despise. More a nip-and-tuck operation, turning DISCORDANCE into DISCO DANCE, or FACTS and TRUTH (reverting to Scripture class) into the Bible books ACTS and RUTH.
Perhaps my favourite deletion trick involves writer PHILIP PULLMAN, a fluke with its own scripture echo. Author of The Golden Compass, among other adventure stories, Pullman has been viewed by some Church bodies as impugning Christianity through his novel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The rap seems only fitting, given the man’s deletion credentials. Get his name – PHILIP PULLMAN – and delete every letter that appears twice or more. With no mixing needed, the aftermath is HUMAN.
Time to turn our focus to 26-Down, our lone deletion clue. In the grid you’ll notice that every possible cross-letter has already been secured, giving us the oddity of D _ T _ O.
What fits? Regardless of the recipe, or even knowing what category applies, it pays to think that way. Each cross-letter in place, why not anticipate the answer, and then consult the clue, seeing if your theory holds good? Is DETRO a word? What about DITTO?
In crossword parlance, any single-use square is nicknamed an ‘unch’, or unchecked square. American crosswords have none, since every square is used twice. In cryptics, however, thanks to the waffle pattern, the unches abound.
My advice, therefore, is to make hunches about the unches. Amazing how often you can intuit a solution via the letter sequence. Let’s say you’re chasing a nine- letter word with this pattern:
_ _ D _ _ _ _ _ A
What fits? Assuming it’s a single word we can rule out MODERN ERA or LADY DIANA. Maybe nothing springs to mind. That’s fine. The exercise is always worthwhile, a pre-clue means of priming the brain.
In this case, with an A-ending, we could be hunting a proper noun – possibly a country or place name. Verbs are off the agenda. Could it be a fancy plural? Thinking this way, you’re poised to pounce, with the clue your final piece of impetus.
Maybe HYDRANGEA is the answer. Then again, if the clue fails to mention plants or bloomers, you’re probably amiss. No harm in guessing. Or maybe you’ll encounter this clue:
London park shortened walk beside a flower (9)
Even if you don’t fully grasp the wordplay, you now have a HYDRANGEA hunch. And you’d be right too, but why? There’s the flower, but how does the rest work? Just like Steve Irwin’s ZOO, this clue belongs in the deletion category, or at least a deletion/charade hybrid. Here’s how it works:
HYDE is the London park. The signpost to delete is shortened, asking you to drop the name’s closing letter. The rest is pure charade, where walk (RANGE) + A adds up to flower.
Deletion clues are often used as part of something larger. Segmenting any word, charade-style, you’ll often make an offcut or two – not whole words but scraps and clusters of letters. We’ve already seen how a single letter can be signified by subtle means (remember an R can be nerve centre, or right, or war’s end). In the same vein, when splitting answers into smaller fragments, deletion is a handy tool.
Typically, a single letter is removed, most often from the front or back. Starting with the head – or its lopping – you scout for signposts like behead or topless or the other useful markers at the end of this chapter.
When it comes to tail-snipping, watch for commands like almost or endless. In Cryptopia, if a word lacks finish you crop its closing letter. Then again, if FRANK doffs his cap, he’s RANK. Treat these actions as literal, and beware the more furtive signposts like dock and clip (often parading as nouns).
And just to keep you alert, a deletion clue may ask you to snip both ends. This double action can come with signals like shelled, skinned, losing extremes. A shelled PRAWN, in other words, is RAW. A skinned COYOTE is OYOT, which could fill TA to make TOYOTA. That’s how deletions can come into play.
Alternatively, a PRAWN’s shell would be PN, and the word’s meat, so to speak, is what needs deleting. That brand of shenanigans lurks in these two clues of mine:
Clear edges facilitating folding = CREASING (CR+EASING)
Aquatic animal trapped by extremely ravenous rats = ROTTERS (OTTER in RS)
When it comes to culling, the other piece up for removal is the centre. If an APPLE is cored, it turns into APLE. (As a rule, the fragments to be removed are minimal. A setter won’t expect you to carve out a larger ‘heart’ or an extended ‘tail’ – unless the clue specifies that liberty.) For this type of surgery, keep awake to such signposts as disheartened or gutless.
The final trick is when a deletion clue targets a specific letter, or letters, to be removed, rather than suggesting any particular location. So drug-free year is YAR (losing the ‘E’ of ecstasy), or a pointless LESSON could be LO (as you lose all the word’s compass points), just as timeless Stuttgart is SUGAR.
Now you can see why such an applied recipe is spared for the book’s second half. The art is so versatile that only a cryptic Jedi will master it. I swear, if I’d told you this formula 100 pages ago, you’d have freaked. But now I hope you can appreciate the elegance of this next deletion, a clue from Flimsy in the Financial Times:
Budget Speech beginning to be ignored (6)
Speech is not a homophone flag, but a definition of ORATION. Ignore that word’s beginning and you’ll end up with RATION, meaning to budget. Cheeky? Yes. Compact? Ditto. Which leads us back to the Master clue:
Outlaw fled outlaw to repeat (5)
Okay, so the answer is DITTO, but why? This is the benefit of a smart guess, just as HYDRANGEA allowed us to step through Hyde Park trickery. Here repeat is the definition, while the adjacent word to accounts for your answer’s tail, TO. So how does DIT, the other chunk, arise from outlaw fled outlaw?
Fled must be the deletion signpost, where one piece abandons another – but which escapes what? As a hint, don’t forget that outlaw can also be a verb, despite the clue presenting the same word as a noun. Given that DIT must play a role, what synonym for outlaw holds DIT?
BANDIT. Good. Then what is fleeing? Logically it must be BAN, which is outlaw as a verb. When BAN flees BANDIT, you’re left with DIT. Plus TO = DITTO.
Bravo. You’ve cracked your first deletion. Though a word of warning. Apart from charade, the other common accomplice in the deletion category is the anagram, where a clue can ask you to amputate and then perform the makeover. Here’s a neat example from Phssthpok, another Financial Times setter. (The alias salutes a galactic pilgrim created by sci-fi writer Larry Niven.) See how you cope with this:
Playing sudoku almost earns prestige (5)
If I told you the answer begins with K, and owns D for its heart, would that help? Can you get any hunches form the unches? One word to obey that pattern is KUDOS, which means prestige. Following the wordplay then, playing looks like the anagram signpost. Sudoku almost, or SUDOK, is your fodder, while earns is a classy linkword, as your anagram play earns KUDOS.
Not that sudoku enjoyed much kudos in June 2008. As scandals go, the strife in Sydney’s District Court must rate among the darkest day for newspaper puzzles, and certainly the most infamous. That said, puzzles and outlaws have colluded to a considerable extent down the years, on both sides of the moral ledger.
THE GAME’S UP – legal proceedings and puzzle novels
Judge Peter Zahra had no choice. Despite the millions ploughed into legal fees, the sixty days of court time, the stream of witnesses, His Worship discharged the jury and aborted the trial.
The culprit was a puzzle. One juror had photocopied a bunch of sudoku, handing them rou
nd to help pass the hours spent listening to legal argument. Three months into the proceedings, one accused saw a woman in the jury box juggling numbers in a smaller box. When other grids were observed, the defence counsel applied for a discharge. The judge obliged. The matter in hand was a complex trial, involving drug factories and firearm possession. No juror was the wiser for pencilling numbers during proceedings. The hearing was scratched and the alleged outlaws quit the dock.
Criminals are bound to earn a further reprieve, thanks to puzzles. Michael B. Lewis, a psychologist at Cardiff University, put sixty people through a simple cognitive test, first giving them a range of common pastimes, including Sudoku and both styles of crosswords – the quick and cryptic – as well as random passages of a Dan Brown thriller. Lewis then engaged his guinea pigs in a memory game, asking them to glimpse fourteen faces for a period of three seconds each. Next, after five minutes of distraction, be it crosswords or sudoku or Dan Brown’s opus, the subjects were shown a larger batch of faces, twenty-eight this time, with the earlier faces scattered through the deck. The challenge was to pick the faces previously seen. The results went on to raise a few eyebrows.
While a secret sudoku habit may ditch a trial at the Sydney District Court, a cryptic crossword apparently has the power to unhinge an entire investigation. Too many anagrams, Lewis asserts, can handicap a witness who later surveys a police line-up. Too many double meanings, and crucial details start to blur. Put bluntly, Lewis says, ‘Eyewitnesses should not do cryptic crosswords before an identity parade.’
The skill is known as ‘face processing’, referring to how we differentiate subtle details in the features of strangers and new acquaintances. According to this Welsh experiment, all other tested pursuits did little to jeopardise a brain’s ability to recall faces. Cryptics, meanwhile, are music to the perp’s ear. Expose a witness to a few deletions and he’s liable to finger Mickey Mouse for the Great Train Robbery.
In defence, it must be said that crosswords can boast one criminal scalp. The 1980 trial involved a man called Brian Keenan, no relation to his namesake, the writer. Scotland Yard accused Keenan of being an IRA operative, which he denied. He told the court he’d never been to a certain London address, a refuge associated with a known bombing cell, but that story came unstuck when detectives recovered a Daily Mail from the premises. Inside was a crossword partially solved in Keenan’s own hand. Across and down – open and shut.
Elsewhere a crossword played a vital role in a probate hearing in 1999. One year shy of her 100th birthday, Anetta Duel died intestate in her East Sussex home. Or so it seemed. Leonard Andrean, a nephew, had the task of tidying up his aunt’s belongings, stumbling on a page torn loose from the Daily Telegraph.
‘Our aunt was mentally active until she died,’ he said, which seems an obvious thing to say, but the crossword hobby was also a lifeline for the family. Above the clues, Leonard noticed a handwritten message: Don’t throw this sheet away please.
Closer inspection revealed a scrawl on the puzzle’s margins, a makeshift will in the same spidery hand: I leave all my money and possessions to Len and I hope he will be happy as long as he lives. God bless you, Aunt Netty. Goodbye.
A frail signature was attached. Yet being adrift from its newspaper, this last testament needed a date to be deemed official. Thus Val Gilbert was summoned, the Tele’s puzzle editor, whose filing system fixed Crossword 22515 in the calendar, and Len duly inherited his aunt’s earthly goods.
Still with matters legal, Inspector Morse has a strong crossword link, largely through his creator, Colin Dexter, a man who juggled crime writing with puzzle setting for the Listener. Now in his eighties, Dexter is the genius behind the Codex alias, as well as the author of some dozen mysteries featuring Morse and Sergeant Lewis. (Both names derive from Puzzleland, with Jeremy Morse and Dorothy Lewis being Dexter’s constant rivals in the Listener’s clue-writing contests.) If you read deeper into the Morse books, several other puzzle surnames bob up, including such setters as Jonathan Crowther (aka Azed) and Don Manley (Quixote, Bradman or Duck), both as suspicious types.
Around the early 1980s, the puzzle craze erupted into crossword novels. Detective cases in the main, most cases hinged on grids that readers had to solve in league with the shamus. Titles to note are A Six-Word Letter for Death (by Patricia Moyes) and Murder Across and Down (Herbert Resnicow – with the puzzles set by maestro Henry Hook). There’s also a series composed by US spouses Cordelia Biddle and Steve Zettler under their collective pseudonym of Nero Blanc. Cases include Corpus de Crossword and Death on the Diagonal, with the cutest tagline on offer belonging to Two Down, where ‘Up, down or across – SOS spells danger…’.
A timely reminder that the clues to come won’t be getting any easier. Death isn’t waiting around the corner, but concussion certainly. Are you prepared? Down the alley lurk the rarer recipes, including puns and reversals, codes and rebuses – no relation to the Scottish detective. So if you ain’t hardboiled, start running.
RECIPE PRECIS: DELETIONS
Deletion signposts tell you what needs losing. If a first letter is to be dropped, then look for leaderless, doesn’t start, lose face or fail to open. If the last letter needs to go, then curtail, detail, Manx (those cats with no tails), nearly, trim or incomplete are candidates. Gutless and heartless suggest you slash the centre, while peeled, shelled or skinned call for the dumping of the outer two letters. In contrast, words like borders, fringes or extremely can indicate that the two peripheral letters are kept, with everything else scratched out. (Extremely WISE, in clue-speak, can mean WE.) When larger chunks go, like MI in MISLED to make SLED, then fair clues will specify which portion (or its size) that needs removing.
HALL OF FAME: DELETIONS
Caligula for one lost his heart to a horse (4) [Times 8309]
Jumped up, not using head – crash! (5) [Crux, FT]
Half Basque, half French? Cool (6) [Bonxie, Guardian]
Figure went during tragedy when outraged (6) [Times 8097]
First of autumn leaves turning putrid (7) [Henry Hook, US]
Mention having cup of tea skimmed (9) [Paul, Guardian]
SOLUTIONS: roan, prang, quench, twenty, rotting, reference
QUIZLING 18.1
We’re thinking of a word
Meaning connect, but
When prefixed by a vowel,
The new word means cut.
QUIZLING 18.2
Reading left to right, taking a letter per word, can you spell three related words? Your six leftover letters can be jumbled to spell a fourth member of the same set.
CASH COIR CARE RANG WADE BAIT
QUIZLING 18.3
What word meaning chicken
Can lose its head
To spell a second bird
Instead?
Alternations
CHAPTER 19
After boomers it regularly goes
next! (3–1)
‘Guess what, Mom?’ says Lisa Simpson. ‘I’m a cruciverbalist!’
‘Oh Lisa – another religion? You know you’ll just drop the whole thing at college when you get a Jewish boyfriend.’
A short trip to Springfield Library would have eased Marge’s nerves. Lisa’s new obsession was secular. Mind you, cruciverbalism does ask for meditation, and inspires a degree of worship and close text study.
Lisa had her epiphany in Season 20, going from lemonade seller to crossword champion in one episode. Bitten by the bug, she dreams in black and white. Hopscotch grids mutate into letters. Before long she enrols in the Crossword City Tournament, where Lisa meets a sharky real estate agent called Gil Gunderson. Despite her talents, Lisa loses, mainly after hearing that Homer has wagered all his dough on Gil. The girl is furious. She renounces her surname and storms off the podium.
To repair the damage, Homer hires the two biggest names in US cruciverbalism – Will Shortz and Merl Reagle – and gets them to phrase an apology. Woven into a puzzle of course, with a hidden message. Viewers onl
y get a glimpse of Reagle’s grid, though the same puzzle ran in the New York Times a week after the episode, on 16 November 2008. For Shortz, the Times puzzle editor, the synchronicity sealed the deal. When Tim Long, a producer of The Simpsons and the episode’s chief writer, asked Shortz if he wanted to join the storyline, the editor was flattered. ‘But I added it’d be really cool if the crossword on the show could also appear in The Times on the same day. He liked that idea. And that’s when Merl got involved.’
A toon tragic from the crib, Merl had to pinch himself. ‘For me, to be such a total nut for animation since I was a kid, I never even dreamed … it’s like a dream I never had coming true.’
Lisa’s puzzle was no doddle. The eight celebs chosen as the key entries had all been distorted by Reagle’s wordplay. (Passionate tennis star, for example, is MONICA ZEALOUS, while LINDSAY LOW-HAND has no face cards.) Hiding obliquely inside the solution is Homer’s apology: DUMB DAD SORRY FOR HIS BET. Lisa spots the message, hugs her dad and all is swell in Springfield again. Cut to credits.
Yet this is not the first message hiding in the New York Times, nor the only one inspired by a father’s affection for his daughter. Winding the clock back sixty years we find the clean and swooping lines of Al Hirschfeld, the lifelong master of caricature work.
Al plays the Homer role in this story, and the part of Lisa is fulfilled by Nina, the artist’s only child, born in 1945.
Hirschfeld enjoyed a dazzling career. At the top of his game, his work generated exhibitions, movie posters, lithographs. But his true signature became the stylish means of hiding NINA – the name – into his work.
The fall of a drape, glassware: the name could appear anywhere within the portrait. Over a span of fifty years, Al became adept at tucking NINA’s letters into hemlines and hairdos, jewellery and table settings. But fans grew so fixated on playing seek-a-word that Hirschfeld feared his art was being overlooked. So he dumped the gimmick, only for an uproar to erupt.