Puzzled Read online

  Puzzled

  Puzzled

  Secrets and Clues from a Life in Words

  DAVID ASTLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Profile Books Ltd

  3a Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  First published in Australia by Allen & Unwin

  www.allenandunwin.com

  Copyright © David Astle, 2012

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The excerpt from The West Wing was written by Aaron Sorkin,

  © John Wells Productions, 1999.

  ‘Early Morning Poems’ by Roger McGough from Defying Gravity (© Roger McGough 1992) is printed by permission of United Agents (www.unitedagents.co.uk) on behalf of Roger McGough.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84668 542 2

  eISBN 978 1 84765 816 6

  Typeset in Palatino by MacGuru Ltd

  [email protected]

  Printed and bound in Britain by

  Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

  The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

  For the girl whose name is hard to spell

  Contents

  Introduction: How the Bug Bit

  Master Puzzle

  Anagrams

  Chapter 1: Expose Russ, Ned, Hector (7)

  Chapter 2: Ignorance spoilt nice scene (9)

  Chapter 3: Enhanced means to focus on scatterbrain locus (10)

  Chapter 4: Discourteous shift is dispatched, subcontracted (10)

  Charades

  Chapter 5: Nebraskan City Circle gives old lady a laugh (5)

  Chapter 6: A weir worker set … (7)

  Chapter 7: Early curve superb on cheerleader (7)

  Chapter 8: Cockney chaos going to stir green (7)

  Containers

  Chapter 9: Sucker pens article for website guide (4,3)

  Chapter 10: Women’s mag covers one Italian painter (6)

  Hiddens

  Chapter 11: Creepy film absorbed in autopsy chopping (6)

  Chapter 12: Partial set closer?! (3.)

  Double Meanings

  Chapter 13: Giant flower shop online (6)

  Chapter 14: Decrease anaemia remedy? (4)

  Homophones

  Chapter 15: As mentioned, weather to get hotter? (5)

  Chapter 16: Soundly ushered back and docketed (9)

  Chapter 17: Nation hunting craft in Italian canal, say (9)

  Deletions

  Chapter 18: Outlaw fled outlaw to repeat (5)

  Alternations

  Chapter 19: After boomers it regularly goes next! (3–1)

  Codes

  Chapter 20: Koran avidly studied by Arab holy leaders here! (6)

  Exotics

  Chapter 21: Pizza centre behind which French grill? (4)

  Manipulations

  Chapter 22: Dope doubled his $500 in seven days (4)

  Puns

  Chapter 23: Swinger’s bar for partner pickups? (7)

  Chapter 24: … Twister for openers? (8)

  Reversals

  Chapter 25: Snub regressive outcast (5)

  Chapter 26: Pacific islander immune to revolution (7)

  Spoonerisms

  Chapter 27: Seafood nibble causing pains for Spooner (4,5)

  Rebuses

  Chapter 28: M __ __ E (4,2,4)

  &Lits

  Chapter 29: Central period in time-spread one spent! (7)

  Hybrids

  Chapter 30: Almost completed month hosting upstart libertine (3,4)

  Chapter 31: Disorientated, guided east of tall grass zone one slashed (10)

  Chapter 32: Press disrupt opening about Russian writer (8)

  Chapter 33: New 24-across-coated pickup yet to be delivered (2,5)

  Mini Puzzles

  Mini Puzzle 1: Friendly

  Mini Puzzle 2: Friendly

  Mini Puzzle 3: Tricky

  Mini Puzzle 4: Tricky

  Mini Puzzle 5: Gnarly

  Mini Puzzle 6: Gnarly

  Quizling Solutions

  Mini Puzzle Solutions

  A Word of Thanks

  INTRODUCTION

  How the Bug Bit

  Forget Batman. My hero as a kid was the Riddler. Every afternoon after school I longed to hear that cackle coming from the television. I adored the lurid jumpsuit, the bowler hat: the whole puzzle package. How his crook-like cane was shaped like a question mark, and his henchwomen – Query and Echo – were smart, verbal babes trained in combat and repartee. And no one got hurt. Or killed, at least. Murder wasn’t on the Riddler’s agenda. His mayhem of choice was bank jobs and wordplay. True, the guy was a psycho, but my kind of psycho, a villain after my six-year-old heart.

  His obsession of course was the riddles, those brain-curlers he left scattered round Gotham City. Puns were his calling cards. (What people are always in a hurry? Russians. How many sides has a circle? Two – the inside and outside.) Where Batman had the muscle, the stamina, the entire Bat-armoury, he often struggled to match the limber brain of my lime-green pin-up.

  Where is a man drowned but still not wet? That’s another riddle I recall, a coded warning for the caped crusaders. Quick, the clock was ticking. I dreamt up a vat of liquid honey – is sticky the same as wet? Or maybe talcum powder. Can a man drown in fabric, or dust, or fairy floss? By the time I’d stumbled on quicksand, so had Batman, literally, drowning in the Riddler’s booby trap. If not for a Bat-grapnel we may have lost him.

  The routine was relentless, every caper a fresh string of clues, and I loved it. Somehow I fancied puzzles might be a calling. (Bear in mind I was six at the time.) Just imagine, living on a wordplay salary. And why not? The idea felt no less weird than selling sea monkeys or X-ray spectacles.

  At my local library, I dug out jokes and limericks, riddles and knock-knocks: a menace in search of ammo. I revelled in embarrassed zebras and ducks quacking up. Pity my family, nightly copping the dandy-lions, the sand-witches and every other groaner in the book.

  On top of puns, I nagged Mum for puzzle books, the rainy-day kind with dot-to-dots and spot-the-difference pictures. I circled French towns in seek-a-word boxes. I filled the blanks and built pyramids out of letters.

  By late primary school, I started to see secret messages lurking in food labels. Eta Mayonnaise, I saw, held the sentence ‘I annoy a mate’ in reverse, and did I bug my family with that discovery. Shades of the day I found the fluke hiding in OVALTINE:

  ‘No one’s leaving the table until you solve a puzzle,’ I told my younger siblings.

  ‘Not another one,’ whined Kate, Sister One, a future psychologist.

  ‘Pass the milk,’ said my brother, Richard, a defiant spirit to this day.

  ‘Is this like a game?’ wondered Sister Two, Lib, a multilinguist-in-the-making, barely out of nappies.

  ‘What two colours are inside Ovaltine?’ I slid the tin across. ‘You have to use every letter once, and once only.’

  ‘Grnfff,’ said Kate, her mouth full of Weetie Puffs.

  ‘Huh?’ said Lib.

  ‘Violet,’ said Rich. ‘Can I go now?’

  Escape was never
so simple. I stole my brother’s spoon, pointed to the Ovaltine label as the only ticket to freedom. ‘Is tin a colour?’ asked Kate.

  ‘The tin is green,’ observed Lib.

  Richard was seething. ‘You want some Ovaltine on your head?’

  ‘Tan,’ said Kate. At least she was trying.

  ‘Tan and …?’

  ‘Who cares?’ they replied.

  To say I was a pain in the neck is a fair summary of those days growing up. But puzzles were a virus in the blood. Even the fact that ASTLE, our surname, held a dozen different five-letter words seemed to validate my calling as a mix-master. Most names are lucky to produce one or two words, whereas mine carried its own trove, from STALE to STEAL, from mill streams (LEATS) to the Serbian whizz behind the radio (TESLA), from SLATE to TEALS, from TELAS (weblike membranes) to TAELS (40 Chinese grams), from a memorial pillar (STELA) to bristly (SETAL), from TALES and, lastly, LEAST. Likewise I loved the idea that DAVID could lose his head to become AVID, and as long as I was losing myself in letters, I felt impassioned.

  A billboard near my nan’s house showed a butcher standing at his block. Pleased to Meet You, ran the caption. Meat to Please You. Smitten, I recited the slogan like a mantra, the ad a kind of scripture for a punster on the rise.

  The taller I grew, the deeper the mania. Staying with Jessie, my maternal grandmother, I burrowed into her Webster’s International, a burgundy-bound dictionary too heavy to lift. Inside were cross-section diagrams of hydrants and spider orchids, camshafts and Spanish galleons. I dug up words like wittol (a tame cuckold) and had to check what cuckold meant. The book was a universe in alphabetical order.

  Most visits, Jess and I played Scrabble, matriarch versus punk. The board was a turntable I ended up inheriting once Jessie drew her final tiles. But back then, with a pile of arrow-roots on a plate, I played ridiculous words like ITE and CAL and NAE, and Jess spent half the game combing Webster’s to see if her grandson was precocious or desperate. Possibly both.

  My parents bought me crossword magazines just to shut me up: the quick American variety where little words like ADIT (a mine entrance) and ORT (food scrap) ruled supreme. My fingertips turned black from the ink of umpteen grids. I grew familiar with baseball abbreviations, New York mayors, and people with vowel-heavy names like Oona Chaplin, Yoko Ono and the architect I. M. Pei.

  I doted on Scrabble tiles. The game came with two dozen dice inscribed with letters instead of numbers. I blew weekends just rolling the cubes across the carpet. (Of course I also managed to break a nose playing under-12 rugby, fall in love with Katrina Ferguson, play bad tuba, ride my bike, but all this was downtime from the alphabet’s thrall.) Shaking the cup, rolling out the cubes, I moved the letters into words, the words into knots of criss-crossing Zs and Vs to maximise my score.

  Genetically the letter-bug stems from Mum, an avid reader still, and long-time lover of Lindsey Browne, the man who made crosswords for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. For Heather, come day’s end, nothing beat a Gordon’s gin and a wrestle with the clues of LB. I envied her rapture, in a way. Still just a kid, I could only shrug at the private dialect of cryptic puzzles. Cat bites philosopher. Correspond with a Spartan almost. What the hell did it mean? I blamed the gibberish on adulthood, a code to master once you knew how to drive, or hang a door, or talk to the opposite sex without your face catching fire.

  The first cryptic clue I solved was at our local drive-in. The bill was a James Bond double, and the car teemed with siblings. Amid the chaos I can still picture the Herald folded to the puzzle page.

  This was the summer between two schools. Sean Connery had just saved Jamaica and Dad was off getting ice creams. Seizing her moment, Mum tried to finish the puzzle but had no chance of solitude, not with a tweenage verbaholic leaning over her shoulder.

  Burning silver and blue, read one clue. Mum took her time, doodling in the margin. Next she wrote AGLOW in the grid. The best I could muster was ‘Why?’

  ‘Chemistry,’ she said. ‘You’ll do that in high school.’

  ‘Chemical what?’

  ‘The symbol for silver is Ag, which leaves us with blue.’

  ‘Hang on. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Not just the colour. What else does blue mean?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. A mistake?’

  ‘That’s right. Or a brawl. Or here,’ she tapped the page. ‘Blue means sad, or low.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Put them together and you get a word for burning – AGLOW.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Thus the flame was passed from one cryptic nut to the next. Mum went on to explain how a disrupted MONDAY spells DYNAMO, or flower can mean a tulip as well as something that flows. She said that WONDER makes RED NOW when turned the other way, or AGLOW was called a charade, since the word is broken into smaller pieces, just like the parlour game breaks movies into syllables. ‘Get it?’ she asked.

  ‘Give me another clue.’

  ‘Here’s one.’ And she read the clue aloud: ‘Follow in green suede shoes (5).’

  No surprise, the Riddler sprang to mind, his dapper costume, though his shoes of choice were plimsolls.

  ‘You’ve fallen for the trap,’ Mum warned. ‘Don’t think literally. Ignore the shoes and concentrate on the words.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?’

  Bond by now was chasing Blofeld on a skidoo, and the rest of the family was shushing, but Mum persisted. ‘Green suede. Look inside the letters. What do you see?’

  ‘Sue,’ I said.

  ‘Stretch it out. What’s a word for ‘follow’ that ends with SUE?’

  ‘Pursue,’ I said.

  ‘Look deeper – it’s all there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Forget about the shoes. Look at the letters.’

  ‘ENSUE?’

  ‘Voila.’

  The buzz outlasted the movie, the drive home, the next day. Suddenly a month of summer camping became a retreat devoted to the cryptic art. Little by little I learnt to spot anagrams, homophones, red herrings. Early mornings I’d wait for the ferry, her cargo the latest LB crossword, plus answers to the puzzle from the day before.

  I started high school, a culture shock entailing Latin and straw hats, where a man called Snags sealed my fate. To this day I don’t know why Keith Anderson, my English teacher, had that nickname, but back in 1974, my first year of high school, Snags was good for two favours. One, he fostered my creative writing, and two – he caught the flu in August.

  Enter Max from geography, a fill-in teacher who took the helm one morning with a newspaper under his wing and no idea what class he was supervising.

  ‘English,’ we replied. Year 7, we were suck-ups.

  ‘English, eh?’ Max opened the Daily Telegraph and flicked through the pages. ‘Here y’are.’ He stabbed the puzzle section. ‘Make me a crossword.’

  Methodically, I did. Max was amazed. Or maybe furious is a better word. His task was meant to be a time-sponge, but a few ticks before the bell here was some smartie submitting a 15-by-15 grid with symmetry and clues and the whole caboodle. Damn – now he’d have to run off copies.

  That maiden puzzle – a crisp Xerox circulating the corridors – put a new spring in my step. With only one problem. Max had neglected to run off the solution, meaning I fielded enquiries from all levels of the academy.

  ‘Hey Astle, what the fuck is PERFIDY?’

  ‘How d’ya spell OCCURRED?’

  If this was the puzzle life, I wanted more. To think half the playground was taking my name in vain, enmeshed in my logic. I felt like the Riddler, curbing the urge to cackle my glee.

  At home, instead of drawing pie charts and Venn diagrams, I drafted grids and wove words inside them. I began collecting names and phrases. Overnight a drab textbook on Australian explorers gave up such gems as ERNEST GILES (SINGLE TREE) and TANAMI DESERT (TAN + AMID + gnarly TREES). In my own small way I felt in step with the explorers, my landscape a sp
rawl of untapped language. I kept up the headway with LB on the train. And come 1979, amid final-year exams, I sent a parcel to the man himself, care of the Herald, Ultimo 2007.

  Inside was a monster grid, hand-drawn and pencil-shaded, coinciding with the newspaper’s milestone. CONGRATULATIONS SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, read 1-Across, with the baseline adding: TEN THOUSAND CRYPTIC CROSSWORDS NOT OUT.

  In many ways the gesture was a tribute to the man for his years of mental bedlam, since I knew he had crafted most of those 10,000 crosswords himself. Or then again, it was my painstaking way of getting noticed, a tentative plea to join the fun.

  LB took the bait. He sent me a reply, enclosing a copy now busy with arrows and stars, circles and crosses: lessons in the art of clue-building. Margins teemed with comments: nifty anag, less abbrev. And slowly I rose to the challenge. A correspondence bloomed. Every month a slew of raw puzzles would return to my letterbox with LB’s sage appraisal. We became pen pals in the same city, chatting about grids and the Moscow Olympics, what anagram potential RONALD REAGAN might offer. But we didn’t meet in person till 1982, some three years into our exchange.

  I remember the day in living colour. Driving down the leafy ridge of Greenwich Point, a millionaire’s row of barristers and mortgage brokers, I nursed the butterflies of a blind date. At 21, an adult on paper, I was due to meet a crossword god, aged 66, in his secret puzzle palace. But really, there was little blindness involved. I’d been entering the LB mindscape six days a week for almost a decade, divining clues as personal insights into their creator. I knew the man’s humour (punny), his gripes (bureaucracy), his loves (cricket, classical music). And to a lesser degree, he knew mine.

  First thing I noticed, his house was not a palace. The million-dollar view was a spray of jacaranda against a paling fence. The garden steps crunched with snails. I rang the bell and heard the footfalls. The man who opened up was every inch the mad professor, broad in the shoulders and with caterpillar eyebrows. We shared a pot of tea and ate some chocolate hedgehogs on the patio. His office was a kitchen nook, a lifetime of battered books and graph sheets strewn across the bench. I felt honoured to share his company and spooked at the same time.

  Hindsight has helped me explain that unease. As a protégé you sense your future self in your mentor, just as your mother-in-law foreshadows your wife. Yet passion in both scenarios tends to quash the doubts. Fatally, I had no choice but to tamper with words. If my career path led to this kitchen cranny, so be it. And perhaps LB detected that mutual flaw, anointing me with a Herald debut a year later, in 1983.