Crossword Principles

Crossword puzzles nowadays, as acrostics did before them, aim to entertain two quite different publics. The first, and naturally by far the larger of these, wants, in the absence of a good book or interesting news in the paper, to make a railway journey pass quickly, to be diverted for half an hour in an armchair or over a solitary lunch in the heat of the day, or to relax in the evening with something which calls for thought of a not too exhausting kind. Often in the home, sometimes in the car, less often in the railway carriage, the effort at solution is a communal one. This public probably doesn’t mind if it doesn’t finish the puzzle, or even if it goes to sleep in the middle of it. Its members are not very critical: as long as they can solve a reasonable number of clues, they don’t mind very much how sound in small details those clues are.

But they do, rightly, make certain demands. They are not walking dictionaries or encyclopaedias, nor do they travel carrying such works or keep them beside their armchairs. They therefore expect the vocabulary of their crosswords to be that of the man in the street. Harassed composers in a hurry, when driven into an awkward corner, sometimes get out of it by using an unfamiliar word; but this is naughty of them: if they do it too often they deserve to lose their fans. Other demands which ordinary solvers make are these: they like some of the clues to be amusing: they like an element of surprise when the penny drops — “Oh, of course! I never thought of that: it’s a good one, that”, and above all they like, when they have thought of an answer, to feel absolutely sure that it’s the right answer. Though they are not, on the whole, irritable people — they don’t take crosswords seriously enough to be irritated by shortcomings in them — they can be irritated by this sort of sequence: “It looks as if x ought to be the answer, but I daren’t put it in; it doesn’t really satisfy the clue.” Next day, when the solution appears, “oh, it was x, after all; I wonder how the blighter would justify it.” But they seldom bother to write and ask him, and so the blighter goes on getting away with it. Nor do they in many cases realise just what was wrong with the clue. I intend in a later chapter, on cluemanship, to examine in detail what I think are the most important causes of unsoundness in clues. If the reader agrees with me, perhaps he’ll write that letter more often, and the blighter won’t go on getting away with it; or perhaps some of the blighters—I’ve been one myself often enough—may also agree with me, as I did long ago with my own mentor, Afrit of the Listener, and they won’t be blighters so often. Many of them already are blighters very seldom, or only in one or two particular ways.

The second, much smaller, public does its crossword not merely as a diversion but because it is really devoted to word puzzles and enjoys the challenge of a tough problem. Its members may sometimes solve a normal crossword for fun, though they won’t regard it as fun if they are held up beyond half an hour or so, because they will inevitably suspect (often justly) that the composer is doing the dirty on them. But what they really want is not a sound easy puzzle but a sound difficult puzzle. They don’t in the least mind being made to use dictionaries and, within reason and reach, other reference books; they are even prepared to find crosswords educative, and they en oy meeting extraordinary-looking importations from other languages, found in some dictionaries, such as sdrucciola, (triple, of rhyme, Italian), kibbutzim (Jewish communal settlements in Israel, Hebrew), and obsolete English words such as agraste (=aggraced, i.e. favored, Spenser). But, of course, to lead the way to such atrocities there must be, in addition to a definition, a subsidiary part of the clue alluding to the letters or parts of the word: then the ingenious solver can deduce what the word is without knowing it and merely look it up afterwards to make sure. Take “agraste” for instance: this is a particularly nasty specimen, because it isn’t even given in the only smallish dictionary which includes it (Chambers’s) under its own spelling but under “aggrace”, with two Gs, so that it’s hard to find. But suppose the clue is “Tucked in, getting outside fat in Paris, becoming well-favoured as of Old.” “Getting outside” makes it clear that the first part refers to parts of the word: “tucked in” must be a short word outside, or including, a French word meaning “fat”. The first can hardly be anything but “ate”: so we have AT _ _ _ _ E or A _ _ _ _ TE. What is your French like? If it’s as had as mine, you may not know that there are two words meaning “fat”—”gras”, a noun, or adjective, as in “foie gras”, and “gros”, an adjective: if you don’t, you probably have a dictionary or someone to ask. ATG is impossible even in Spenser: so it must be AGRASTE or AGROSTE. Now the definition was “well-favoured”, “favour” = “grace” will make you come down on the side of AGRASTE. And you needn’t even look it up in the dictionary: it must be right. Even if the French word is unattainable, there are crossing words which may supply enough letters to suggest to you an old spelling of something to do with “grace”.

I have written at length about this one clue, to show how a straightforward subsidiary indication can enable the solver to get at an unknown word—and, of course, knowing little French isn’t often a handicap. French isn’t widely used in my crossword clues or anyone else’s.

This second crossword public, it can fairly be said, was created by the late Edward Powys Mathers, widely known, loved by addicts, and feared by the uninitiated, as Torquemada. He started, when crosswords in Britain were very young, with a series called “Crosswords For Riper Years” in the Saturday Westminster. Soon afterwards began his famous series in the Observer. He combined a mind brilliantly agile in using letters and words with a vast and varied knowledge of literature, and he applied both to the composition of maddeningly ingenious crosswords which at first seemed quite impossible. Gradually one came to follow the workings of his mind, and the first complete solution of one of his puzzles was a legitimate cause for pride.

He was a pioneer in every way. Most crosswords, when he started, had nothing but definitions for clues—very dull work for the puzzle-minded. He determined to retain some definitions but to sprinkle his puzzles with clues which were much more elusive and amusing. He also determined to add to the difficulty by using obsolete and little-known words. He thought that in puzzles of the standard he intended to set a symmetrical diagram, like those most other composers were using, with blocks alternating with spaces for letters so that many letters were not checked by crossing words, would produce too much difficulty. So he (I am almost sure) invented the system of using bars between the squares, making an unsymmetrical diagram look less unsightly than one with unsymmetrically placed blocks. He disregarded symmetry: he wasn’t interested in the diagram as an artistic thing, and he didn’t always compose it himself: it was, I believe, often composed by his wife, who was provided by him with lists of words to be worked in. Such devices as reversed words, words split into two parts of the diagram, bits of words and two or three-letter abbreviations were all admitted, in order to include as many of his chosen words as possible and at the same time to reduce the number of the unchecked letters. This “bittiness” could be irritating, but one got used to it, and it was largely atoned for by the enthralling interest of the struggle with his mind.

His clues were of three sorts: (1) The verbally agile, the precursors of the modern cryptic clue. But they weren’t like anyone else’s cryptic clues: he had an indescribable wit of his own which distinguished them from the work of other authors. Many of them weren’t strictly sound by later standards; but one knew what to expect and very, very rarely felt that he had been unfair. This was his type of clue that I enjoyed, and this was Torquemada for me. (2) The literary. He loved quoting from his favourite authors, and often he would include three or four words from one source in the same puzzle. Many solvers found their greatest pleasure in these and loved being sent back to their shelves to recover a forgotten passage. I admit that I was not one of these: to me a direct rotational clue gives no pleasure. Either you know it, and there is no great thrill in writing the answer in; or more probably you don’t, and I am too lazy to enjoy research. But the words were fully, or nearly fully, checked, and such clues were never impossibly numerous. (3) The definition. Yes, he didn’t break away entirely from the existing norm. This happened sometimes, as he openly avowed in print, when he couldn’t think easily of anything amusing or tortuous and therefore decided that this was “no time for trifling”. Occasionally he did it deliberately as a double-cross, making the definition look as if it were a tortuous cryptic clue. And if anyone nowadays feels like calling this resort to a dull definition a weakness, let him remember that Torquemada was a pioneer, and also that he was a genius of a most original kind; rules of cluemanship are for ordinary mortals, not for such as he was.

But most of us are ordinary mortals, and I therefore maintain that we are unlikely to succeed, as Torquemada did, in building up a large and satisfied clientele of solvers, unless we follow certain principles and keep a firm check on ourselves lest we be unfair. And this applies as much to the everyday kind of crossword, for transient amusement only, as to the connoisseur’s type . I hope I am not being too egotistical in illustrating this idea by my own experience.

When I (with, at first, two partners in crime) succeeded Torquemada in the Observer in 1939, I began by trying to imitate my predecessor closely. Complaints from solvers were few, so perhaps my clues were not really so dreadful as they seem to me now and would, I am sure, seem to my present solvers. But it is more than possible that the absence of an outcry was due to the patience of solvers who realised that they couldn’t expect a new Torquemada to be built in a day. Nevertheless I feel sure that the close imitation was misguided: to succeed in crossword composition, an in literary work, one must be oneself. It took me a long time to discover that my particular crossword self was one that worked best with a framework of fixed principles within which to be original; and I should have taken even longer to discover lt, if it had not been for the arrival of one great influence, Afrit (the late Prebendary A. F. Ritchie) of the Listener.

He had been composing his crosswords for some years before I was first introduced to them by a solver of mine, Mr L. E. Myres, to whom I am eternally grateful: the dedication of this book to him is a small token of this gratitude. Afrit’s Listener puzzles were desperately difficult, too difficult, for some time, for me. One reason why they had to be difficult was that the Listener at that time was offering a prize for every correct solution received! But he composed, later, easy everyday crosswords too: there is a book of them called Armchair Crosswords, published by F. W. Warne & Co., now, alas, out of print. An example of this type (not from the book), as well as a tough Afrit, will be found among the puzzles at the end of this book. He asked me to write a foreword to Armchair Crosswords, and in it I expressed my conviction that the crossword world needed standards, and that Afrit was the man to set them.

In his introduction to that book he refers to an imaginary Book of the Crossword and summarises the principles he supposes to be set forth in it. If he had been a less busy man—he was a headmaster as well as prebendary of Wells Cathedral—or had lived longer, perhaps he would have written it; if he had, there would have been no room on anyone’s shelves for this book of mine. My chief excuse for writing it is that I want to enlarge on that necessarily brief introduction, especially on what he says about the art of writing clues, which is here the subject of Chapter V. It is many years since he wrote that introduction, and I have added further principles of my own, as well as deviating in some ways from his; but I want there to be no doubt about the extent of my debt to him.