There are also standard cliches which solvers soon spot – a soldier may give you RE, or perhaps GI an L may give you a learner (as in L plates for learner drivers), although it might also mean left, large, lake or Latin. Some enthusiasts disparage the anagram, yet it helps the solver to get the game under way, and at its best can be an enrichment of life – as when carthorse yields orchestra, or Manchester City becomes synthetic cream (they were playing that way at the time), or Britney Spears, Presbyterians. Hugh Stephenson, the Guardian's crossword editor, has three pages listing such devices in his book Secrets of the Setters. The use, for instance, of anagrams, whose presence is often indicated by words such as mangled, messy or mutilated. Some of the tricks of the trade are now ancient. Yet the letters you need in this case may make up the name Plato. "That," she says, rejecting a proffered solution, "is what they want you to think it means." A clue may include the words "Greek character", which will usually indicate the presence of such letters as mu, nu or pi. In his 2003 book Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8), Sandy Balfour describes his girlfriend's struggles to get him to solve cryptic crosswords. Or often, at first, away from it: since this is a world in which fiendish is a term of approval and the work of its best protagonists is admired for a phenomenon, rare in most trades, that might be called honest deception. It is still the case, in most instances, that a clue will contain a definition, equivalent to the word or words you need to install, and a cryptic variation to point you towards it. That's not to say they don't observe rules. But some of the younger setters, who revere him as the master, take even greater liberties from time to time. Most of his Guardian faithful will tell you there never was, and never will be, a setter to match Araucaria. John was an orthodox Anglican minister, but in crossword terms he was a joyous heretic, who, strict Ximeneans might have considered, deserved to be burned at the stake. Others favour the far more libertarian style embodied in the work of John Graham, Araucaria of the Guardian, who died in November. He was one of a school that favoured strict rules for crosswords, which he embodied in a book call Ximenes On the Art of the Crossword, published in 1966. Ximenes was Derrick Somerset Macnutt, who taught me Greek at Christ's Hospital school, not a happy experience for either of us. The Observer was the pacemaker here, unleashing on its customers first Torquemada and, after him, Ximenes, both named after Spanish inquisitors. Over the years, ingenious hands have developed more and more techniques for making their solvers sweat. It's the cryptic and supercryptic, though, that are serious business. The quick is sometimes thought to be simple but that isn't always the case: a clue may simply say "draw", but that's a word whose alternative meanings command a whole column in any thesaurus. The art form has evolved in different ways in different countries, but here there are now essentially three varieties: the quick (as in today's Guardian Review,) the cryptic, below the weather on the penultimate page of this section, and the supercryptic, for ace solvers only, like Azed in tomorrow's Observer. Today's familiar black squares were in those days unknown. All you had to do was to fill in the answers to questions like "the plural of is" (3) and "what artists learn to do" (4) – even if one or two demanded more erudition ("the fibre of the gomuti palm", the answer to which was "doh".) Wynne's puzzle was shaped like a diamond. The then Manchester Guardian followed four years later, 13 months ahead of the Times.īut it also has to be said that crosswords today bear about as much resemblance to Wynne's pioneering number as does the Goldberg Variations to Chopsticks. The first newspaper in Britain to use them seems to have been the Sunday Express in 1925.
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