Puzzled Read online

  SCAFFOLDING was my first 1-Across – Back off in burning metal framework – and I’ve been ‘constructing’ for the paper ever since. Anonymously at first, as was the house style, then later using my own initials. Those two letters – DA – are how most people have come to know me. Don’t Attempt, swear some solvers. Dangerously Addictive, the other camp.

  But before mapping out the book, let me finish my Riddler confession. After twenty-five years of crafting clues for a wage, I feel the time is right to lose my workaday clothes in order to reveal the lime-green leotard underneath. In many ways this book is a coming-out exercise (‘Yes, I make puzzles and I’m proud of it!’), as well as a chance to lead you through the oddity of Cryptopia. In the coming pages you’ll see how different clues operate and why each style throws new light on the words around us.

  You may think that you know English but I’ll show you its flipside. Across twenty-five years I’ve found some extraordinary features in so-called ordinary words, just as OVALTINE hides TAN and OLIVE. Ready or not, you’ll also get to plunge into a Master Puzzle, a multi-level challenge that’s waiting to be solved around the corner.

  That’s right, a single grid is beckoning, each of its thirty-three clues sparking a different chapter on the art of puzzling and the secret lives of words. You’ll also read about the peculiar life of clue-mongers, including mine, and the tangled tale of human wordplay, how an ancient itch to toy with letters has led us to this black-and-white curio we call a cryptic crossword. Just be warned: the further you travel down this winding road, the more likely you’ll catch the bug that once bit me.

  So what’s going on?

  At first glance the Master Puzzle will seem like any other crossword: a prim block of black and white squares, numbered and clued like any other. But this baby has some stories to tell.

  To give you the best tour of Puzzleville I’ve loaded the box with the twelve key recipes, from anagram to charade, from rebus to container. Solving as we go, we’ll encounter puns and codes, homophones and deletions – each clue warranting its own chapter and detours, a solution included.

  Expose Ned, Russ, Hector, for example. That’s not 1-Across, but Chapter 1, and where we’ll start the puzzle, entering the grid and the cryptic story as a whole. Each chapter will help you produce a new answer for the grid, as well as tips on how each formula works. Yet far more than a how-to manual, this book is a mystery tour through language, a master crossword to solve as we travel.

  That’s our destination – one finished puzzle. Yet as we unravel the clues, we’ll also hear about the Pappadam Argument, the Sator Stone, the Accidental Swastika, the Centipede Tower and plenty more puzzling topics.

  Lipograms? Signposts? Unches? Clue by clue we’ll uncover the tips and traps, the origins of puzzles and the changes over time. See the Master Puzzle as your ticket to strange locations with DA as your guide – tormentor as mentor. Come the final clue a crypt will be opened and a cryptic puzzle cracked.

  For the pro, the trip will sharpen your lateral reflexes. For the tyro, take heart: the rewards are wild, even if the head-spin verges on vertigo. Even should you never confront a puzzle again, this trip at least tells you what the whole weirdness is about.

  So turn the page and meet the Master Puzzle. If the spirit is willing, solve what you can on your own, filling in what you can, then read the stories behind the challenge. Or better yet, skim the clues on show and see if you feel that dangerous tingle in the mind, the same one I felt as a kid, looking for a way in. Cockney chaos? Swinger’s bar? What the hell is going on? Here’s your chance to find out.

  If you’ve never solved a cryptic crossword before, then make this your first. Or if this coming puzzle is number 10,000 in your life – give or take – then I will make your 10,001st memorable.

  MASTER PUZZLE

  MASTER PUZZLE CLUES

  Across

  1 Women’s mag covers one Italian painter (6)

  4 Press disrupt opening about Russian writer (8)

  10 Central period in time-spread one spent! (7)

  11 Almost completed month hosting upstart libertine (3,4)

  12 Disorientated, guided east of tall grass zone one slashed (10)

  13 Pizza centre behind which French grill? (4)

  15 Snub regressive outcast (5)

  16 Ignorance spoilt nice scene (9)

  18 Seafood nibble causing pains for Spooner (4,5)

  22 Nebraskan City Circle gives old lady a laugh (5)

  24 Decrease anaemia remedy? (4)

  25 Discourteous shift is dispatched, subcontracted (10)

  28 Swinger’s bar for partner pickups? (7)

  29 A weir worker set … (7)

  30 … Twister for openers? (8)

  31 Creepy film absorbed in autopsy chopping (6)

  Down

  1 As mentioned, weather to get hotter? (5)

  2 Sucker pens article for website guide (4,3)

  3 M _ _ E (4,2,4)

  5 Expose Russ, Ned, Hector (7)

  6 After boomers it regularly goes next! (3–1)

  7 Pacific islander immune to revolution (7)

  8 Nation hunting craft in Italian canal, say (9)

  9 Giant flower shop online (6)

  14 Enhanced means to focus on scatterbrain locus (10)

  15 Soundly ushered back and docketed (9)

  17 Partial set closer?! (3.)

  19 Cockney chaos going to stir green (7)

  20 New 24-Across-coated pickup yet to be delivered (2,5)

  21 Koran avidly studied by Arab holy leaders here! (6)

  23 Early curve superb on cheerleader (7)

  26 Outlaw fled outlaw to repeat (5)

  27 Dope doubled his $500 in seven days (4)

  ANAGRAMS

  CHAPTER 1

  Expose Russ, Ned, Hector (7)

  Last year a nephew tugged my sleeve at a barbecue and asked, ‘What is God?’

  I took a deep breath, stalling for time, wondering how agnostic I felt that week. In the end I dished out some sloppy view of the cosmos only for Simon to interrupt. ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s a mixed-up dog.’

  A bright kid, Simon loves SpongeBob and Doctor Who – but he’s yet to discover the pleasure of cryptic crosswords. (I’ll give him time – he’s nine.) My point being, most of us nurse a knack of juggling language. The day we misspell RECEIVE on paper, switching the middle vowels, or call someone Amy instead of May, or gaze at a STOP sign and see words like POTS or POST – we know how anagrams work. We order and disorder by nature. To see the message ELVIS LIVES scribbled on the subway wall is to get the verbal joke.

  To prove the instinct, try reading this: Tnrinug rdnaom ltteers itno amgnraas ceoms eislay buaesce haunms nluralaty ajusdt cohas itno oderr. (Or said more plainly: Turning random letters into anagrams comes easily because humans naturally adjust chaos into order.) Even if you didn’t pounce straight away, I’m sure you grasped plenty. The brain is trained to do so.

  Bart Simpson’s brain included. Stuck at ten years old, Bart spotted the mix-up potential of The Rusty Barnacle’s menu. Lethally the letters were magnetised, allowing the brat to switch the words with ease. Thanks to one quick shuffle COD PLATTER turned into COLD PET RAT.

  Aged nine, I wasn’t any better. My dad was an old sea captain who thought our home needed a better communication system. So he put a batch of fluorescent letters on the family fridge, a means for all of us to leave messages or make shopping lists. Imagine his rage when he saw BREAD MILK EGGS turn into guff like MILD GEEK BRAGS or KGB RAIDS ME LEG.

  Even now I can’t pass a MOBIL sign without LIMBO looming in my head, or pour a glass of PEPSI and not think PIPES. Crazy, I know. A benign affliction in many ways, and one I failed to stifle when dating in my early twenties.

  Tragically, her name was Melissa, a psychiatric nurse from Gordon in Sydney’s north. She may have laughed, driving to the restaurant, when I said her suburb held the word DRONGO. Perhaps she risked a smile when I noted her birth name could be re
ndered into AIMLESS. Yet by the time we’d passed a mattress showroom called Capt’n Snooze, and I somehow felt the urge to report that SNOOZE is a blend of OZONES, we both sensed the night to be in trouble. If her grimace wasn’t a clue, then the moment I caught her taking case-notes under the table certainly was.

  Anyhow, most people, if not Melissa, have the anagram knack. The reflex is latent in our system. And that makes it time to meet three boys called Russ, Ned and Hector: our first clue of the Master Puzzle.

  As you’ve suspected, we’re talking anagrams – the oldest type of cryptic clue, and perhaps the most familiar to newcomers. Back in the late 1920s, when cryptic crosswords first emerged in Britain, the anagram was the original trick in the setter’s bag. Leonard Dawe, the science teacher who scored the maiden crossword gig in the Daily Telegraph in 1928, chose a blend of plain vocab and trivia for his clues. Incursion, say, at 13-Across, was RAID. Visionaries led to SEERS. A river in France? LOIRE. Drawing a steady audience, the puzzle carried a touch of Greek myths and Oliver Cromwell, plus a smattering of new concepts in XRAYS and TNT. But no anagrams. Not yet.

  That tack was taken three years later, in league with several other papers across the land, when suddenly Dawe and other setters ignored the obvious definition of a word like OVERLAP, opting instead for A plover (anag.) (7).

  Gradually a game was hatched. While the people of America – where the crossword puzzle began in 1913 – still wrangled with clinical synonyms, reading a clue like ‘glut’ to help reveal SURFEIT, the Brits had other ideas. Dawe, in fact, clued the same word as Fur ties (anag.). Fittingly, in the same puzzle on 7 May 1928, the science teacher added one more anagram clue: Cheer it (anag.), namely HERETIC, as that is how the whole cryptic deviation must have seemed to the US purist.

  We’ll be talking more about the American Revolution (and British Evolution) of crosswords in time to come, but for now, it’s important to see how anagrams and cryptic puzzles go hand in hand. Soon every British offering was marbled with anagram clusters, with no other defining element aside from an order to rearrange.

  Yet every good thing has its day, and soon the solving public required a bit more subtlety. Anyone can see that PLUM is a mix of LUMP, so what real joy is lurking in such a pallid morsel as Lump (anag.)? Answer – not much. Leonard Dawe and Co could no more depend on the bald and the blatant to satisfy their solvers. Instead compilers had to disguise their anagram clues, which leads us back to Russ, Ned and Hector.

  For many readers this book’s first clue – Expose Russ, Ned, Hector – will represent their first cryptic clue, full stop. In which case, to avoid too many false trails, let’s take a step sideways and see how cryptic clues in general are put together.

  RUMBA IN BURMA – quick versus cryptic clues

  My two pinup poets as a teen were T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, those two enigmatic men with initials for names. The first, I knew, was an anagram of TOILETS, the second, I didn’t realise, was a crossword nut.

  One day, arguing with a pal across the Atlantic, Auden said that despite cryptics seeming more complex than their US cousins, they also happen to be more precise. In other words, while straight clues are more straightforward, cryptic clues can diminish any doubts about the eventual answer. The best way to illustrate the point is to go dancing …

  Imagine 1-Across in an orthodox puzzle reads ‘Style of dance’. Sounds easy, but there are dances galore. In the 1960s, for example, the floor was busy with the Watusi, the Yuletide Jerk and the Popeye Waddle. So where does that leave us? Letter count will throw more light on the subject. In this case, our missing dance has five letters, allowing us to cancel the camel walk, the stereo freeze and the doctor’s boogie. But then we’re stuck in limbo. Wait, is LIMBO the answer? What about WALTZ? POLKA? STOMP? RUMBA? The choices stack up.

  Next step – check the grid. Do we have any cross-letters in our imagined crossword – other answers crossing our mystery dance? Let’s say no. The grid is empty, with 1-Across awaiting our guesswork.

  Fine, let’s imagine the dance we need is WALTZ. If that hunch is right, then 3-Down (in a lattice-like grid) must begin with Z, the last letter of WALTZ. And if that’s not likely, then WALTZ must be wrong. (These are the theories you test to limit your answer pool.) So let’s try WALTZ: how does 3-Down read, our supposed Z-answer? Let’s imagine this next clue reads African nation (6).

  Yay. This must be ZAMBIA. So now you enter both answers – WALTZ across and ZAMBIA down – convinced you’re on the right track. But hang on. Say the correct dance is SWING, meaning the G works just as well for GAMBIA. Or why can’t RUMBA bring ANGOLA into play? Or POLKA and SALSA do the same thing? And if CAPER is kosher as a dance, then RWANDA is up for the rumble too. Suddenly you’re doing the Hippy Hippy Shake in a minefield, the words of Auden ringing true.

  Despite their name, quick clues often ask for slow and cautious responses. Unless a clue is dead specific, like young cat for KITTEN or Turkish hat for FEZ, then a solver can never be sold on a single answer. Compare this to a cryptic’s generosity, with each clue carrying two elements. Different schools call them different names, but in this book we’ll know them as the definition and the wordplay.

  Definition, of course, speaks for itself. Magic stick (4) is WAND. Orthodox puzzles give you nothing else. A cryptic clue on the other hand does the solver two favours, providing both a definition of your answer and a little word-game to help get you there. The trick is telling the two apart. So let’s get back to that mystery dance, and check out these two cryptic clues:

  Dance revolutionised Burma (5)

  Burma-style dance (5)

  As we know, dance in both clues is the definition. This leaves us with Burma in either case, plus a third word in the shape of style or revolutionised.

  Notice anything in common with these last two? Think about style, the verb. The word means to shape, to make over, in the same way revolutionise means to shake up, or change. Both are labelled anagram signposts in the crossword trade, sometimes called anaginds (or anagram indicators), but I prefer signposts. They’re telling you to agitate the adjacent set of letters, in this case BURMA, to reach your answer.

  Signposts are vital in anagram clues. A setter needs to plant a word suggesting upheaval or renovation, a word like stir or shock. Seasoned solvers look for these indicators on impulse, mixing the adjacent clues to satisfy the definition. Which here we know is dance.

  Mind you, dance can also be a signpost, as can any word embodying motion, making both sample clues a bit more slippery.

  Trickier still, both the likely signposts (revolutionised and style) occupy the clues’ midpoints. Placed there, a solver has to decide which end needs mixing to give up the answer. Ten times easier if the signpost opens or finishes a clue, confining the definition to the opposite end. Let’s take a second look at both examples.

  In the first example – Dance revolutionised Burma – you know the middle word is the signpost as revolutionised is too long to be the fodder (or letters to scramble). So your eye then falls on Burma as the batch to ‘revolt’, giving you a kind of dance…

  In sample 2 – Burma-style dance – the chances of style holding a word that means Burma are next to zero. Besides, what else can Burma mean? It’s a country, right? Aside from being the old name of Myanmar, what more can be said, word-wise? Making style your probable signpost, with dance the definition.

  And bang, out jumps RUMBA. The jig is up.

  Bear that in mind as we go. As opaque as a cryptic clue may seem at first, the opposite can apply. Where a quick setter gives cold definitions, the darker cousin offers two roads to reach the one destination.

  As you solve more clues over time, you’ll separate the two key elements with greater confidence, recognising where the division falls. Jonathan Crowther, a long-time setter for The Observer in the UK, known to most of his fans as Azed, put it best. ‘A good cryptic clue’, he wrote, ‘contains three elements:

  a precise definition;

  a fa
ir subsidiary indication [or wordplay];

  nothing else.’

  In other words, every word counts. In the case of anagrams, you’ll be facing a definition, plus a signpost and the fodder (which adds up to the wordplay). Though signposts, as you’ve gathered, may be tricky to isolate. Already in this section we’ve had a range of words standing in for signal duty: style, stir, dance. What next, you ask. Red, white and blue?

  Well, black and blue could do the job, despite being a phrase, since those three words capture the sense of being battered. But I hear your uncertainty. Let’s open the way to signposts.

  SIGN HERE – anagram signposts and surface sense

  Tangle

  Snarl

  Brew

  Jolt

  If Paul Simon knew 50 ways to leave his lover, the cryptic compiler knows 500 ways to mislead his solver.

  Wreck

  Wrench

  Crazy

  Kinky

  The crunch is change. Even crunch is cool – or crush, or bash. As long as the word embodies an altered state. Yet change – the notion – is fickle in its own right. Words like odd or outlandish can also suggest a deviation. Thus a clue like Exotic Burma dance is a valid route to RUMBA.

  Compatibility is the key. Setters look for signposts that chime with the other parts. Drafting a clue for CHAIN-SMOKER, say, a phrase that holds HEROIN and SMACK, I may retain the clue’s druggy flavour this way:

  Smack, heroin, crack, tobacco addict (5–6)

  Then again, in composing a food-related clue, I might turn to kitchen words to act as that simpatico signpost. ORANGE, say, is a blend of GEAR ON, making one possible clue: