A rudimentary tool kit for solving British puzzles
The relentlessly inventive constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley told The New York Times in 2013 of his predilection for cryptic crosswords. Not only do cryptics dominate his solving time, he said, they also have made his construction more playful:
The cryptic bug has forced me to anagram words I would normally never have bothered to anagram, look for words contained in other words, even notice words running backward.
There’s still another reason for trying out the strange British form. I maintain that cryptic crosswords are easier than their definitional cousins—and I maintain that in the face of goggle-eyed skepticism from those who have seen those odd phrases that don’t appear to have anything to do with what anyone might reasonably pencil into their grids.
The reason is this: A cryptic clue typically gives you two routes to the answer. Consider a noncryptic clue like “Disposition (6).” This could be answered by LAYOUT, or MAKEUP, or TEMPER, and there’s no way of knowing which the constructor has in mind until you get some letters from another clue—which will itself be subject to the same holdups.
Now imagine that it’s a cryptic crossword and that same entry is clued with what is known as a double definition: a clue in two handy, interconnecting parts. Let’s say “Kind disposition (6),” from the constructor known as Rufus.
There’s only one word that fits both halves of the clue once you think of “kind” not as in tenderhearted but as in “What kind of man is this?” and “disposition” straightforwardly, as in “an unfriendly disposition.”
So you can write in NATURE without worrying about whether it fits with the other clues—although it would be a shame not to linger for a moment on the pleasing surface reading: the welcome sight of someone who is going to be nice to you. And this is pretty much as short as cryptic clues get: As you’ll see, longer ones start to tell miniature stories, or present you with endearingly daffy imagery.
More importantly, you don’t have to worry as much about the grid: You have a sense when you’ve cracked each clue, without having to see whether the option you’ve chosen is going to mess up the interlocking entries. In a cryptic, each clue is a miniature puzzle in itself.
This was the goal of those eccentrics who developed the cryptic form in the Britain of the 1930s. As we saw earlier, the posher British newspapers had waged a campaign against the crossword when it arrived from America; when they performed an about-face, they at least had the decency to come up with something a little different to print in their pages.
Happily, they were able to call on the services of people like Edward Powys Mathers (1892–1939), a poet and translator who liked crosswords well enough but worried that they were too repetitive “to hold for long the attention of anyone concerned with and interested in words.” (He chose the name of the Spanish Grand Inquisitor Torquemada as his nom de guerre, and as we’ll see, most British constructors operate under mysterious pseudonyms.)
Hence clues like the spoonerism, and indeed the double definition: There is a pleasure in seeing how two bits of language with apparently unconnected senses can each lead entirely fairly to the answer.
If you can see how “Quits flat” works, you’ve got the hang of the double definition. Two more:
Boat put in water (6)
Very exciting, filthy habit (4-6)
From the constructor known as Virgilius, the first is LAUNCH (a noun and then a verb); the second, by Paul, is NAILBITING (adjective, then noun).
The next weapon in your tool kit is the cryptic definition. In a typical cryptic clue, you find a definition of the answer at the beginning or the end of the clue; here you get another one making up the rest, like in the double definitions above—but things are a little more playful. These are kindred spirits to the clues in American puzzles that end with a question mark and suggest something allusive is going on.
So, in “Savagely competitive boxer getting to do more than bite his opponent? (3-3-3),” the first two words are the definition of DOGEATDOG and the rest is a more picturesque route to the same destination. The fact that you will inevitably read “boxer” as a sportsman rather than a canine and spend some time thinking about Evander Holyfield’s pinna in Mike Tyson’s buccal cavity is part of the fun.
Here is another couple. If they don’t yield, having a look at the answer and working backward is just as good a way of grasping how it all works.
Remember Pooh’s imaginary? (4,2,4)
Unfathomable, not like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (10)
So these are BEARINMIND, by Orlando, and BOTTOMLESS from the London Times, the constructors for which are anonymous.
Most often, the definition part of the clue is coupled with something that asks you to move letters around to find the answer, often an anagram. In such clues, you are given—though it is not obvious which is which—a definition of the answer, an indication that you should be jumbling some letters, and precisely those letters that need jumbling.
That indication could be anything that suggests change: movement, disorder, or even drunkenness. So in Notabilis’s clue “President’s unexpected vote loser (9),” “unexpected” tells you to scramble “vote loser” for President ROOSEVELT.
More anagrams:
Strange I should tan poorly (10)
Demand to rewrite scenes in it (10)
The first, by Puck, is an anagram (“poorly”) of “I should tan”: OUTLANDISH. The second, by Mudd, is an anagram (“to rewrite”) of “scenes in it”: INSISTENCE. Not too fiendish, are they?
Even less Mephistophelian is the hidden answer. Here, again, there’s a definition at either the beginning or the end of the clue; the rest is made up of a string of words that contain the answer and a hint that this is what’s going on.
The pleasure here is in noticing that the answer has been in front of you the whole time, hiding in plain sight. So in the London Times’s “Some forget to get here for gathering (3-8),” you’re being asked to take “some” of the letters of “forget to get here” for GETTOGETHER.
What’s in Latin sign, if I can translate, is of no importance (13)
As seen in jab, reach of pro miserably failing to meet expectations? (6,2,7)
The first, by Brian Greer, is INSIGNIFICANT; the second is from the London Times: BREACHOFPROMISE.
As the pioneering cryptic constructor Afrit wrote, the clue that hides the answer “may be flagrantly misleading, but the solver cannot complain, because there the solution is, staring him in the face.” Harsh, but fair.
You’re ready now for the information that the hidden word might go backward, like in this clue from The Sunday Telegraph: “Cooking equipment taken back from heiress I tormented (10).” Same principle, but “taken back from” means we read some of the letters of “heiress I tormented” in reverse order for ROTISSERIE.
I am not going to pretend every clue contains each of the letters of the answer. No, other times, you’re asked to come up with one word and then write that one backward: the reversal. Here you find a definition of the answer; as you must be expecting by now, a hint to another word; and an instruction to write that one backward to find the answer a second time.
So it is in this clue, from a qualifying puzzle for the London Times’s crossword championship: “Grass one should put back, and maybe does (4).” Here, you use “Grass” to summon up the word REED and write it backward for the answer DEER, noticing in passing that “does” is one of those words whose relevant sense is not always immediately apparent.
And again:
A delay held back a sporting event (4)
Advanced from the right with others (2,2)
The first clue is Jed’s: You put back “a lag” for GALA. The second is from the London Times: “late,” spelled from right to left, gives you ET AL.
Other times, these words you come up with are written in the normal direction, but there are more than one of them, in a kind of clue known by aficionados as a charade, after a tiresome parlor game that need not detain us.
So when Quixote asks for “Student seen as ‘home bird’ (6),” he wants you to take a word for being “home” (in, as in “I stayed in all evening”) and combine it with a kind of “bird” (the tern) to make up a student: INTERN.
A couple of other clues that are just one thing after another:
Players below par no longer wanted (4-3)
Carol thus delivered girls’ beach wear (10)
The players on a stage plus something that’s a bit “off” give us CASTOFF in the first, from Orlando; the other, by Paul, asks you to combine SUNG and LASSES for SUNGLASSES. In a variant of this type of clue, you might be asked to put one of the words inside the other—same principle.
Right, two more devices and you should be ready to solve. Clues that use soundalikes give you a definition at one end or the other, plus a word or phrase and a suggestion that you conjure up another word or phrase that sounds the same. “Excited as Oscar’s announced (4),” from The Sunday Telegraph, for instance, asks you to think of a well-known playwright called Oscar and then write in the synonym for “excited” that sounds the same: WILD. The hint that there’s a homophone can be anything that involves speaking or hearing:
Musical work that’s melodious to the ear (5)
Mentioned pet getting soft drinks (5)
So that’s SUITE (which Chifonie says sounds like “sweet”) and COKES (“coax,” according to The Sunday Times).
Finally, a form of wordplay that, we will recall, goes back to ancient prophecies scribbled on leaves. Yes, it’s the acrostic, in which you take the initial letters of a run of words in the clue to match the definition. In Orlando’s “Black and white lamb starts to cry (4),” you need the “starts” of “Black and white lamb” for a synonym of “cry,” BAWL.
Likewise:
Does he lead prayer for openers? Is Mohammed a Muslim? (4)
Natty, elegant and trim, primarily (4)
The first is by Bunthorne and gives us IMAM; the second is by Viking and gives us NEAT.
But where, the more diligent reader might be wondering, is the definition in the clue for NEAT? Once you remove the wordplay (“Natty, elegant and trim, primarily”), all you’re left with is a little number four in brackets. But at the same time, that wordplay is in itself a fair definition of NEAT. Very occasionally, the cryptic solver comes across an all-in-one clue like this. One that uses the “hidden answer” device, by Mudd, is “Some hitman in Japan? (5),” where you take “some” of “hitman in Japan” for NINJA.
Our last examples, both anagrams:
Royal at one time—aren’t I spoiled! (5,10)
Punctuation mark perhaps too freely used (10)
A pithy description from Paul of MARIEANTOINETTE and a mild admonition from Rufus about the misplaced APOSTROPHE.
That’s it. You’re a solver. Go and buy a newspaper or spark up your web browser. Most of the clues in its puzzle should yield once you’ve set about them with the tools given above in some combination or other, twisted to produce surface readings in each clue that point you in the wrong direction. Your job is to enjoy—perhaps with a friend or relative—puzzling out what’s really being said. You now know everything the constructor does.
And as for that “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)”—a little cultural knowledge is needed for this one. Lord Archer is a British politician accused by a newspaper of having had sex with a prostitute. He won substantial damages, but suspicions lingered, made worse by his party’s campaigning for Victorian-style family values. He and his wife live in a building called the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, which further upset his critics because it is the former home of Rupert Brooke, whose much-loved poem of the same name is a nostalgic, patriotic favorite. Just when Archer’s rise seemed unstoppable, he was found to have lied in court about the prostitution business, was banished from public life, and went home to lick his wounds.
And so when the retired churchman John Graham, better known as the constructor Araucaria, wrote the clue “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)”—a lovely long anagram of THEOLDVICARAGEGRANTCHESTER—solvers found their pent-up indignation regarding Archer expressed with wit and economy in an ingenious and memorable eight-word rebuke.
Such specific knowledge is rarely necessary to solve a British cryptic; still, since British cultural references may well be too much to take on in combination with a new kind of puzzle, American solvers are better advised to seek out the cryptics in The Wall Street Journal (on Saturdays), The New York Times (every few Sundays), and consistently in The Nation, which is even known to be bought reluctantly by conservative solvers who come for the puzzle and avert their eyes from the politics.
(And if you haven’t scurried away in search of a cryptic—or if you’ve just returned from a successful solve—we move now from Across to Down. What happens to crossword puzzles when they are released into the world . . . ?)