by David Astle
That’s also why my word-watching never sleeps. Every waking hour I filter-feed magazines and conversations in hope of puzzle-ripe patterns. Take the world of music, for example. I may not like the tunes of DINOSAUR JR or OUTKAST, but I adore those letters. In the classic realm I cherish TCHAIKOVSKY and PROKOFIEV – those wonderful Russians again – by virtue of their wacky spelling. So let’s unpick this fabulous man of letters:
Press disrupt opening about Russian writer (8)
Said another way, can you name a word meaning press, of any length, that ends in V? I’ll speak for you – nyet. So Russian writer must be the definition.
We’ve met NABOKOV already, the Russian wordsmith, but he falls a letter short, in tandem with CHEKHOV. Name any others? If you know your literature, you’re home and hosed, assuming your hunch obeys the recipes on show. Let’s look for signposts to see what we’re dealing with here.
Could press be an anagram signpost? Maybe yes, though some solvers and setters could object. If so, that would cast disrupt as your fodder, with no V in sight. Wrong theory.
How about disrupt then? Is that the anagram signal? More convincing, yes, but again the fodder looks scarce. Besides, our established letters (UGNV) aren’t too evident in the clue, another blow to anagram conjecture.
Disrupt has better odds of being a container signpost, as ads disrupt a telecast just as surplus letters may disrupt a word. But what disrupts what? Consult the grid again. Don’t neglect those strong letters, and think of a small word meaning press, I urge you. Ah, URGE. There’s the gap. In she goes, but disrupting what? Our doodling looks like this:
_ U R G E N _ V
Either you know this novelist or you don’t. If I told you that the nineteenth-century author of Father and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, shares my birthday along with King Edward VII and a Puerto Rican rapper named Big Pun, would that be of any use? Letter-wise, maybe, as TURGENEV can now be written as T(URGE)NEV.
It’s a hard clue. Not just as it’s a hybrid, and a less familiar surname, but also because the cues for reversal (your second recipe) are low-key. Opening is a synonym of VENT. About is a muted signal to reverse, one of those sly prepositions that kick you in the shins. When URGE disrupts VENT that’s turned about, you solve the penultimate clue.
I’m only guessing here, but TURGENEV would probably score two points in Eric Albert’s software, the mighty letters countered by the author’s slip from the public mindset. Just think: there’s only 20-Down between frustration and fulfilment, assuming you can summon the divine powers of inspiration. Though beware. As Turgenev once said, ‘Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle.’
QUIZLING 32.1
Logically, what classic Russian novel (4,8) and Pixar movie (3,5) are favourites among such actors as Uma Thurman and Pete Postlethwaite, plus director Hal Hartley, and writers Ray Bradbury and Mary McCarthy?
QUIZLING 32.2
Starting with M, what pharmaceutical word meaning drug is a mixture of NO TIME around a street word for drug spelt backwards? Take all the time you need.
QUIZLING 32.3
What aggressive ocean predator (4,5) is a mixture of fundamental ship parts within a type of ship?
CHAPTER 33
New 24-across-coated pickup yet to
be delivered (2,5)
If I say Lear, do you think jet or king? For a few years, just to prove my inner nerd, I tried solving 100 consecutive crosswords in The Times. The rules were simple:
must be solved on day of publication;
no mistakes;
no cheating, including dictionaries, googling or phone-a-friend.
I started briskly. Reached double figures without losing stride. Six days a week, the clues kept coming, and I kept cracking them. The day I clocked fifty – two months of steady solving – I celebrated with a tall Guinness. (The champagne could wait for the real milestone.) This wasn’t my first time on the mountaintop. I’d scored a quick seventy across the summer, only to wreck my chances with a hybrid:
Violent thief about noon to steal from a person collecting in the Highlands (5–6)
I had every cross-letter too. Getting the solution was only a matter of time, surely. These were the letters already in the grid:
M _ N _ O / _ A _ G _ R
Violent thief had to be MUGGER. In this case, about was a container signpost, unlike the reversal role it just played in the TURGENEV clue. Place MUGGER about noon (common shorthand for N) and then … and then … then what?
I went with MUNGO-BAGGER, lacking a dictionary to ease my doubts. The next day I learnt that MUNGO-BAGGER meant nothing, while a MUNRO-BAGGER is a climber who tries to scale every peak included in Munro’s tables, a list detailing every Scottish mountain over 914 metres. The wordplay is a charade built into a container: MU(N+ROB+A) GGER. In view of the summit, I’d fallen short.
But not this time around. My gaze was fixed. The key to solving continuous grids is resolve, of the stubborn kind. Don’t guess. Isolate recipes and find where the definition is hiding. To quell any doubts, ensure the wordplay renders the answer. Luck doesn’t play a hand. Mind you, to reach fifty puzzles in a row, you do need to make a few intuitive leaps, just like a Munro bagger crossing a crevasse, trusting you land on solid ground.
In my latest attempt, passing eighty by then, I’d almost slipped on BISH (a peculiar word for nonsense) and a strand of seaweed called CARRAGHEEN. I’d survived a chess obscurity called SMOTHERED MATE. But then I struck a royal pickle with a clue involving Lear:
Lines from Lear don’t show fate, sadly, protecting a king (3,5,2,4)
Once again, just like your last Master entry, I had every alternate letter! Just unches to go yet I couldn’t nail the last phrase:
T _ E / _ K _ N _ / O _ / S _ A _
THE SKINS ON SLAB? THE SKUNK OR SHAG? THE EKING OF SHAW? Let’s agree the first word is THE. After that, who knew? I became so panicky I sort of cheated, combing every scene of King Lear in hope of that vital phrase. THE SKINK ON SCAB?
Relax, I told myself. Remember the mantra of LL Cool J – what is the trap? Where is the trap? Or take comfort in Azed’s edict: a crossword has two elements – wordplay and definition – and nothing else. Put King Lear back on the shelf and focus on what the clue is giving you.
An anagram, maybe, with the signpost of sadly, making the fodder DONTSHOWFATE. (Remember the clump theory we applied to RUSSNED, our first clue together?) Twelve letters – we needed two more. Wait, what does the rest of the clue say? Protecting a king – likely a container was the second recipe …
Let’s think. Scramble DONTSHOWFATE around AK (a king in chess), then we get the answer. Wrong again, as there’s no English word spelt AK_N_. I went through Shakespeare again and once more found nothing. In the end I risked THE SKINS OF SEAL, since it sounded the least ridiculous, and opened the next day’s paper terrified.
The truth hit hard. All this time I’d been romancing the wrong bloody Lear. The king bit was a red herring. The man I needed was Edward Lear, the maker of limericks, plus his other nonsense poems, including THE AKOND OF SWAT.
Who or why or which or what is the Akond of Swat, runs the opening verse, and the humiliation in my head.
Is he tall or short, dark or fair?
Does he sit on a stool, a sofa or chair …
I didn’t care. I’d lost the fight. I fell in a heap and waited for the paramedics.
THE LAST LAPSE – endgames and cross-references
My AKOND OF SWAT was panic. I’d never crept so close to a century of puzzles, and that growing sense of anticipation eroded the poise I needed to rumble the clue. Likewise, if the Master Puzzle ranks among your first ascents, then the prospect of filling the final blanks can tend to fray your concentration.
Often, when solving four puzzles a day, I might scribble SCARPER into the gird, instead of SCAMPER, and ruin the finale. Anxiety and eagerness has a history of jinxing any trip. So let’s guard against both and read the ultimate clue:
New 24-across-coa
ted pickup ready to be delivered (2,5)
The last clue, and our first cross-reference, where another answer is needed to read the full message. While we did have the ellipsis pair of ADAMANT and TWISTER, joined by their mutual dots, that was more a marriage of convenience than a genuine cross-reference. Either clue could be cracked in isolation. But this baby is another matter.
24-Across is IRON. All that means, should you meet any more cross-references in your travels, is that you should plant the referenced answer into the clue. This practice is rampant in themed puzzles, and will crop up in normal stuff as well. So now we have a clearer clue reading:
New iron-coated pickup yet to be delivered (2,5)
New murmurs anagram. Coated suggests container. Pickup could be reversal. No wonder this clue is last. The categories are piling up.
The anagram idea, looking at those cross-letters, feels right. The letters of IRON can easily be moulded into a framework, with I and O as our two extremes. If that’s right, what is the internal block being coated?
Could this be clued by pickup? We need three letters, as seven minus IRON equals three. Logically, too, looking at the pattern, those letters are U_E (as IRON can’t account for these two vowels).
IN UTERO? Or said the cryptic way, IN(UTE)RO? Congratulations, you’ve just been delivered. You’ve bagged your Munro peak. You’ve solved the Master Puzzle.
OCTOPUS GARDEN – going slow and getting there
F, of course, is the letter we never used in the grid, though Fe for IRON is chemically close. F may well be your grading too, if the Master challenge is your first outing in the genre. (F for Fledgling, perhaps, or Fumble-fingered, Faint-hearted, Fresh-eyed.) At least that will be the case when you next strike out solo, hoping to climb a crag minus mentor. You’ve already seen how skittish I became, staring dumbly at THE SKUNK OF SCAB, and that’s after years of addiction.
Solving cryptics is not brain surgery – it’s even more delicate, but with far less at stake. Your own brain needs to be thoroughly wired to meet the challenge. You need sharp eyes and stubbornness. And for every clue you crack, you’ll be a surer operator tomorrow.
Take this puzzle, for example. Thirty-three clues later, you know that $500 may mean D, or cheerleader C. A worker might point to ANT, and question marks can signal an inbuilt curliness. You know that words like soundly and say murmur homophone, and if the Reverend Spooner had been born near Albert Square then hairy clues may translate as clarey ooze.
You know swaps and switches are two brands of manipulation, even if you’re bamboozled by which switch is what. That’s OK. Go slow.
Lying inside almost every cryptic clue, you know, is the yin-yang model of wordplay and definition, and these can be tough to tell apart. Don’t worry. That’s the art.
You know that charades mean more than a parlour game, and that ‘hybrids’ can apply to more than cars with power points. On top of that, we know that nescience is a fancy way of describing the vast gaps in our knowledge, whether you’ve spent half your life solving and compiling these symmetrical universes or are daring to enter the genre for the first time. That’s fine. We all start ignorant. Little by little, we get wiser.
The other image I carry with me when solving elusive clues is the octopus. By all reports this slippery creature is crafty in its camouflage and brainy too, using coconut husks as armour or waving its arms to imitate seaweed. At first sight the octopus is terrifying, yet it’s harmless if treated with respect. Those tentacles look lethal but really they enable the animal to attach itself to objects from different angles, much like the eight-clue recipes – a multiple choice of approaches. As for that defence system, squirting a black cloud when lunged at, it’s only ink. Just remember that. It might drift into different shapes, and seem like a new peril, but the brave can reach right through.
To test that new nerve, try the six mini-puzzles lying in the next section and see if the former mumbo-jumbo has suddenly gained a shade of familiarity.
Now that your brain is supple, bend it more, and find out what new regions it can reach – and I don’t just mean Nauru or sixteenth-century Italy. The only place a crossword is black and white is on the page. That’s what I discovered in utero, cocooned in the family Commodore, staring at ENSUE and wondering what other secrets might follow. I still wonder that, gazing at the next bed of clues. Every puzzle is a mystery tour, every clue a head-trip whispering any number of destinations. Now that you know these things, you have my permission to get lost.
HALL OF FAME: HYBRIDS
Fat not left by supplier of beef and chicken (6) [Cincinnus, FT]
Senior priest holding mass at two in old city (7) [Viking, FT]
Before turning haggard, throw up (10) [Henry Hook, US]
Insect is tucking into a dead bug (10) [Times, 8600]
Family doctor warns about seafood (4,6) [Orlando, Guardian]
Argument about bodyline pitch that’s preposterous (6,6) [Moodim, FT]
SOLUTIONS: coward, Pompeii, heavenward, antagonise, king prawns, beyond belief
TO SOLVE – OR DISSOLVE?
Congratulations. You’ve reached the end – or the beginning. Even if you grasp a fraction of this book, you should have enough to infiltrate the next cryptic puzzle, and the one after that, making more headway as you go. Don’t forget to work backwards if unsure – check solutions with clues to see how they marry up. And look back across this book as well, visiting each recipe precis, and browsing the Halls of Fame. And look forward too – as six mini-puzzles lie beyond this page, from easy to slippery: the perfect chance to see how far you’ve come.
QUIZLING 33.1
There’s one girl in King Lear who has LEAR strewn through her own name, and another who arises from strewing two adjacent words in this sentence. Name both.
QUIZLING 33.2
What decor items might,
Elegantly encircle a light,
Where one half’s a holy song swirled
And the other, the intact underworld?
QUIZLING 33.3
By breaking in half a word that is part
Of this puzzle’s poetical start,
And filling the gap with a jumbled version
Of a second word in this diversion,
You’ll spell a hyphenated word relating
To that which is awesome or exhilarating.
What’s the word?
Mini Puzzles
Mini Puzzle 1
Level: friendly
Across
1 Ali Baba’s opening ingredient? (6)
4 Sing inside mosque alcove (6)
9 Diet throwing out meat in gravies?! (13)
10 Mischief-maker altered Kremlin’s façade (7)
11 Fruit: melon, bananas (5)
12 Test for booze in bar? Yeah, let’s rock! (11)
17 Cross five Roman figures (5)
19 Spoken about bit of earth? (7)
21 Guitar legend arranged carols and chants, heartily embraced by St Nick (6,7)
22 Fuel runs out? Unlimited help required (6)
23 Complete in diplomacy (6)
Down
1 Fierce skinhead gave a wave (6)
2 House guest pens link (5)
3 Dahl novel covering one troubled lad (7)
5 Imitate chickens or another bird (5)
6 Puzzles offer cryptic meanings with no end of confusion! (7)
7 Regret a muffin top during Lent (6)
8 Prepared the corn fats for breakfast? (6,5)
13 Backward, though possibly poetic? (7)
14 Pressurise bigoted leader inside Arab nation (7)
15 Still bitter after record write-up (6)
16 Elastic factory storing iodine (6)
18 GP sits on a bee (5)
20 Pageant prize that’s in a royal array, primarily (5)
Mini Puzzle 2
Level: friendly
Across
1 Opposition leader travels for fruit (7)
5 Half-judged as traitor (5)
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8 He left blithe Buddhist reindeer (7)
9 Flatten in the vein of marsupial? (5)
10 Perforates leaves (6,7)
11 Relative one doesn’t start – what a relief! (6)
13 Oil tax affected soup ingredient (6)
17 Caution copper suffering fixation (13)
20 Pay for cure (5)
21 Wild natives least modest (7)
22 Sucker caresses husky’s tail (5)
23 Diet concerning private blokes (7)
Down
1 US singer Roy, or US grazer? (7)
2 Spanish mate I leave after morning (5)
3 Look that gutted Eastern newspaper (7)
4 Upper House chosen at every assembly (6)
5 Batman villain a wild card … (5)
6 … meeting regular nuclear villain with fangs (7)
7 Wee/cut? (5)
12 Head student becomes perfect with right adjustment (7)
14 Porn classification at times: topless, irksome (1–6)
15 Pine-belt battle in Vietnam War (4,3)
16 Feel the cold arrow pouch? (6)
17 Provide bed and board, one way or the other (3,2)
18 Scatty opener sacked, being malicious (5)
19 Lodgers describe a major girder (1–4)
Mini Puzzle 3
Level: tricky
Across
1 Sounded tender – acted dirty (6)
4 Cockney covering his bets on the side (6)
9 Some don’t appreciate being readily available (2,3)
10 Allows curse about the French (7)
11 Limit small explosive (3)
13 John Hancock is repulsed by grand instinct (9)
14 Improbable airline cuts crackers (11)
18 Stirred, a poison must lose no volatile element (9)