The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  It is only when Lord Peter falls into Uncle Meleager’s pond—or, as Sayers has it, his impluvium—that he finds the grid on its watery square-tiled floor. The puzzle is reproduced in the story; it goes beyond cryptics in its esotericism and is not for the faint of heart. Here is a sample clue, which will be part Greek to many readers:

  2.VI. “Bid ’ον και μη ’ον farewell?” Nay, in this

  The sterner Roman stands by that which is.

  ...and the annotated solution Sayers provides at the end of the book with the completed grid . . .

  2.VI. EST: ’ον και μη ’ον = est and non est—the problem of being and not-being. Ref. Marlowe: Doctor Faustus I.1.

  Sorry? Sorry. More traditional and accessible fare is to be found in tales such as Vincent Fuller’s 1925 potboiler The Long Green Gaze: A Crossword Puzzle Mystery, where the suspects in a poisoning case communicate with one another using crossword clues and the answers are given at the end in a sealed section. Likewise in the same year’s Crime of the Crossword by John Garland, a trader in floor tiles is murdered and the arrangement of some of his tiles relates to a set of clues.

  Since then, authors have reveled in titles along the lines of A Six-Letter Word for Death (Patricia Moyes, 1983) and With This Puzzle, I Thee Kill and You Have the Right to Remain Puzzled (Parnell Hall, 2003 and 2006). The best of the subgenre is Herbert Resnicow’s Murder Across and Down, in which the killer of a crossword constructor is revealed by a series of dastardly puzzles set by the relentlessly ingenious real-life puzzler Henry Hook.

  The crosswordiest tec, though, remains Inspector Morse, the creation of Colin Dexter, himself a crossword constructor. Dexter named his detective, Morse’s sidekick Lewis, and many murder suspects after fellow solvers who repeatedly beat him in the monthly clue-writing competition in British Sunday paper The Observer.

  Dexter not only made Morse a solver—one so addicted that he puts time aside for the fearsome Listener puzzle (see the SONDHEIM chapter above); he also makes crossword solving a vital part of the detective’s tool kit.

  In the story The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, Morse has been trying to establish which of the suspects in a murder case might have visited a cinema to see a pornographic film. He takes the time out to solve the London Times’s puzzle, taking an impressive twelve and a half minutes; he would have been within ten minutes but for the clue “In which are the Islets of Langerhans (8),” for which he has —A—C—E—S.

  When the inspector twigs that the constructor is trying to make him conjure up a sea that fits those letters rather than PANCREAS, he sees that the suspects had been acting like a crossword constructor: trying to make him work out who had been in the cinema when nobody had been there at all.

  (It’s a reminder that solving of both the recreational type and the crime-fighting professional variety works best when it does not pick up merely on the clues that are provided—indeed, it is most satisfying and rewarding when what appears to be a clue is in fact a red herring. Identifying what you are not being told, deducing what you are being induced—misleadingly—to infer. An invaluable side effect of solving and certainly, very far from simplistic. Whodunits have provided some of the most ingenious crosswords in the first hundred years of the puzzle. The puzzle that should be remembered as the best of all likewise appeared in fictional form—but this one was not in a mystery story; neither was it wholly fictional . . .)

  FOR WHOM D’OH IS AH DEAR?

  SIMPSON

  The most audacious feat of multimedia crosswording

  The best single puzzle from the first century of the crossword was published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times on November 16, 2008. It has more than a passing connection with the episode of The Simpsons that was broadcast that night—“Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words”—and the story starts the previous spring.

  One of the writer-producers from the Simpsons team attended a talk at University of California, Los Angeles in May 2007. The speaker was New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz and came in the wake of the documentary Wordplay, in which we get an affecting glimpse of the intense world of crossword tournaments (see the chapter FAST above).

  Simpsons supremo James L. Brooks was inspired by these scenes and decided to afflict Lisa with a love of wordplay and send her to a “Citywide Crossword Tournament”—hence the meeting that followed the UCLA talk, at which it was agreed that Shortz would help out with the story of Lisa’s new hobby and make a cameo appearance. That was nowhere close to the ambition realized in the broadcast episode, but for the time being, it was an excellent fit.

  (It should also be noted that The Simpsons has contributed handsomely to the English language: Homer’s annoyed grunt is a more satisfying sense of DOH than “Fiber of the gomuti palm,” as those three letters were clued in the first-ever crossword; MEH is a splendid way of expressing indifference; and until the line of dialogue “it’s a perfectly cromulent word,” English had been lacking a facetious way of insisting that something is legitimate in order to convey that it isn’t.)

  In the story, an irrepressible Lisa becomes a crossword convert. Her school superintendent finds her making crossing words out of the playground’s hopscotch squares—a compulsion to see puzzles where none exist that is familiar to solvers old and young—and he inspires her to enter a puzzle tournament. Naturally, she reaches the final.

  Homer, gambling in a nearby bar, bets against her, and when Lisa discovers his treachery, we witness some heartbreaking scenes: Homer is at a loss for how to make it up to his daughter, and a distraught Lisa gives up on solving altogether. Toward the end of the episode, Marge suggests that the New York Times puzzle might be a cheering way for Lisa to spend a couple of hours.

  Lisa’s fire is reignited: “A couple of hours?! I can do the Sunday puzzle in less than one hour. ‘Couple of hours’!”—and on completing that day’s puzzle in record time, she notices something unusual hidden in the main diagonal: DUMBDADSORRYFORHISBET.

  Yes, a chastened Homer has persuaded Will Shortz to publish a puzzle with an apology in the form of a secret message. That might seem like a fanciful piece of fiction, but as we saw in the chapter NINA above, advanced-level constructors are prone to using the diagonals or perimeters of their puzzles to conceal secret messages.

  Yet there’s another reason why DUMBDADSORRYFORHISBET is not unrealistic: It was real. That is, the puzzle that Lisa solves was an actual puzzle, printed in the edition of the real-world New York Times that was published on the day of the episode’s first broadcast.

  This is where Will Shortz went one better than the Simpsons team’s ambitions. He had commissioned Merl Reagle, one of the NYT’s most playful and imaginative constructors, to construct the grid. Three decades before, Reagle had gone to an alternative weekly called the Los Angeles Reader and suggested that they publish some puzzles he’d been compiling. As he approached the building, he was hoping to meet the paper’s cartoonist, the then little-known Matt Groening, who of course went on to create The Simpsons. He discovered that he had just passed him on the way in. Talking to the Times’s crossword blog in 2008, he ruefully recalled:

  If I had arrived just 15 seconds sooner I would’ve had the chance to meet him and tell him how much I liked his comic and I’ve always imagined that we would’ve been at least casual friends from that day on. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought about those 15 seconds.

  In 2008 Reagle made up for this missed opportunity in spades, designing all the puzzles featured in “Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words”—including those Lisa makes from the hopscotch squares. Even though none of the grids appears for long, Reagle was insistent that any solvers among the viewers should feel that the show had taken the trouble to get the crosswords right.

  This attention to detail is sadly lacking in most television crossword props. Devoted solvers get used to having the illusion of reality punctured by glimpses of a
symmetrical grids or implausible clueing devices, even in programs and films where the attention to detail is otherwise impeccable. Pity the ardent crossworder when he or she beholds in unbelieving horror the complete absence of 1 acrosses or 1 downs in the puzzles containing apparent kill orders in espionage series Rubicon, or the action-comedy movie Hot Fuzz, in which the puzzle tackled by Billie Whitelaw’s hotelier has a jaw-dropping 59 percent proportion of black squares.

  If you want to avoid a subset of your audience drifting off, harrumphing, “Since when did a national newspaper allow two-letter entries?,” the lesson is a clear one. If you need a fictional crossword, tell your props master or mistress to subcontract the work to a constructor. Any constraint the script might put on them is just the kind of challenge they like, and for no other reason than that they can work within it. At one point in “Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words,” Lisa’s tournament rival announces: “I think I’ll warm up with a bunch of Qs,” and dots his competition grid with them. It’s a gag, but Reagle constructed a workable grid with Qs exactly where the animators had arbitrarily thrown them.

  As for the final puzzle, everyone involved was aware that the reveal would be incredible for any viewers who had solved that day’s New York Times puzzle. There is the odd Simpsons reference—MAGGIE hidden in TEXASA&MAGGIES, for example, but nothing that would arouse suspicions of conspiracy. Unless, that is, you’re so familiar with the show’s theme tune that you noticed that the other diagonal contained the letters:

  F A B D C A F D B B B C B B B C E F F F F

  These are the final twenty-one notes of the melody; the E is in fact an E-flat, but Reagle had of course made sure that the answer containing the E was, well, EFLAT. Otherwise, the plan was that solvers should work on what they believed was a completely normal Sunday puzzle, then see yellow animated fingers working on the same grid that same evening.

  Even in the unlikely event that anyone spotted that message in the diagonal, DUMBDADSORRYFORHISBET, it would have meant nothing to anyone who hadn’t been working on the show. One of the greatest pleasures in themed puzzles is what crossworders call the “penny-drop moment,” but never before or since has the pleasure been as delayed or as gratifying as watching Lisa mutter some clues you’d solved that morning before realizing that the denouement of the episode has been hiding in plain view.

  There is a good overlap between those who solve the NYT on Sundays and Simpsons viewers, and minds were undoubtedly fried. New York magazine’s Nitsuh Abebe was solving while he watched, and says, “There was this slow and uncanny real-time convergence between the two.” He began to wonder if he was “just imagining arcane connections between television and reality,” and the moment of revelation was “like being Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense.”

  And that was not all. The fictional Reagle adds that Homer also asked him to include an implausibly demanding acrostic relating to a subplot in which Lisa decides to change her surname from Simpson to Marge’s maiden name, Bouvier. So the first letters of the clues read, in order: DEAR LISA YOU MAKE ME SO HAPPY REALLY REALLY REALLY HAPPY SORRY HE TOLD ME I NEEDED A HUNDRED FORTY FOUR LETTERS WHAT WAS MY POINT AGAIN OH RIGHT BOUVIER OR SIMPSON I CHERISH YOU.

  This idea for the acrostic came from the real-world Reagle; while he might have regretted it when the scriptwriters sent back a message that meant so many clues had to begin with the letter Y, the worlds of crosswords and television would be so much poorer without this remarkable feat of construction.

  (There are other ways of scrambling solvers’ minds, of course—not all of them as welcome . . .)

  CREEPY-CRAWLY—OR WHAT IT IS LIKELY TO DO?

  BUG

  How to vex, rile, gall, or miff the solver

  Here are some clues from the crossword in the National Enquirer . . .

  “Five-headed cow born in Vermont”

  “State with the most UFO babies”

  “Aphrodisiac found in every kitchen cabinet”

  “Where Franco’s brain is being kept alive”

  —according, that is, to the sitcom Cheers. The answers are MAYBELLE, ARKANSAS, OREGANO, and FISHTANK—dubious to you perhaps, but perfectly sound in the opinion of dedicated solver Carla Tortelli.

  Margaret Farrar, the mother of the modern crossword, recalled a letter she had received from an eight-year-old boy who saw that while WOODENLEG would fit the squares in a puzzle she had edited, the answer should be IVORYLEG—since the leg in question was Captain Ahab’s and he had read the book. “Perfectly true,” she reflected, “but I couldn’t help wondering, rather testily, what an eight-year-old was doing reading Moby-Dick.”

  Since the creators of crosswords are in the business of testing solvers on what they do or do not know, it is quite understandable that some of those solvers relish the opportunity to tell the teacher that his or her facts are wrong. “Frogs hop, Sir,” one correspondent informed Will Shortz politely but firmly, “but toads do not. They waddle.”

  Solvers are, of course, supposed to be frustrated, but only in certain ways. The best fictional depiction of the wrong way comes in the very first episode of The West Wing. Our introduction to White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry is an exasperated phone call he makes to the crossword editor of The New York Times about 17 across. “Khaddafi,” he insists, “is spelled with an H and two Ds, and isn’t a seven-letter word for anything.”

  Leo claims to be just an everyday solver, but lets slip that he should know the correct spelling of the name of the Libyan leader because he has proposed a “preemptive Exocet missile attack against his air force.”

  It’s a cracking subplot, but of course there is no “right” way of spelling—or rather transliterating—the name of the former Libyan leader whose name was made of a qaf, two dhals, a fa, and a yaa; more to the point, the clue would not have appeared in this way. Real-life New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz told me that while the spelling in clues follows New York Times house style—in this case “Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi”—the answer grids are different, where, he wrote in an e-mail:

  ... any legitimate spelling is fair game. So in a crossword clue, I would always use “Qaddafi.” In a grid, GADDAFI would be acceptable (although the clue would probably include the tag “var.” in fairness to solvers).

  Puzzles also need to ensure they are not being too hard—or too easy—depending on which day of the week it is. Nothing too taxing on a Monday, please—we’re just getting going, and besides, there are beginners here. But don’t you dare patronize me on a Sunday, when I’ve put some time aside and expect a full workout. (In 1985, The Guardian received a letter from a solver unhappy at the “smart-arse, egg-head stunt” of printing themed puzzles on a weekday: “Number 17,164 introduces a Disney connection—on a Tuesday! Play the game, sir.”)

  Gauging the difficulty of a puzzle is not as simple as it might appear—ponder for a while whether you can guess what proportion of the population has access to any given item from the sum of human knowledge, and you may find that you regard puzzle editors with an increased respect, or perhaps pity.

  Even stickier is the question of what solvers will find acceptable when it comes to good taste.

  When Denise Sutherland’s book Solving Cryptic Crosswords For Dummies was being prepared for the American market, the relatively innocuous clues “Five engaged in awkward caresses lead to rifts (9)” and “Jenny and I go, mischievously loving (8)” were changed to “Eve’s ugly scars cause rifts (9)” and “Appreciating Jenny, I go nuts (8).” (The answers in each case are CREVASSES and ENJOYING.)

  The American puzzle, it seems, is not a place for too much raunch. Even the puzzle that is in its proper place has to tread carefully. Margaret Farrar told the sixteen-year-old would-be constructor Merl Reagle that “crosswords are entertainment,” advising him to avoid “things like death, disease, war and taxes—the subway solver gets enough of that in the rest of the paper.”

&
nbsp; She might well have added to that list bodily functions. In 2006, The New York Times had a clue that read:

  Scoundrel

  Seven letters, and the answer is SCUMBAG. No problem. Except that it was a big problem, and there were complaints from members of the newspaper staff as well as from readers. It’s not a pleasant way to describe someone, but P. G. Wodehouse (of whom more below) had a character describe millionaires as “the scum of the earth” and he’s a respectable writer, so how was offense caused?

  The issue was a different, more physical, sense of “scum,” and the original sense of “scumbag”: a condom. For that reason, The New York Times tends not to use the word: When Congressman Dan Burton said of Bill Clinton, “The guy’s a scumbag,” the paper reported the “use of a vulgarity for a condom to describe the President.” The style guide acknowledges that “taking a stand for civility in public discourse” is “sometimes at an acknowledged cost in the vividness of an article or two.”

  There’s also a potential cost in representativeness, if the representative in question meant only that he considered the president a “base, despicable person” (as the Oxford dictionary gives the later sense) and not akin to a prophylactic.

  To British solvers, this decorum is bewildering. Just as an apparently prim dowager or tweed-clad don might, in the UK, utter a profanity that would appall a stevedore, so can the apparently erudite British cryptic embrace almost all of language, including the scaggy, scuzzy, scummy bits. “Further issues might arise if this billet were not to be occupied” is a typically allusive description of a condom from the generally austere Daily Telegraph.

  It gets worse. Merl Reagle, heeding Farrar’s advice, has spoken longingly of the words that good taste precludes. “URINE would bail me out of a corner a million times a year,” he lamented. “Same with ENEMA. ENEMA: talk about great letters.”