Crosswords and the detective novel
“It’s all clues, isn’t it? Crosswords are far more exotic and exciting than police work. Most murders don’t require solving because they haven’t been planned.”
—INSPECTOR MORSE
The crossword took off at the same time as the whodunit and the jigsaw. It’s tempting to explain the appeal of all three puzzles by some primeval urge to solve, but that type of explanation raises more questions than it answers—which may be the sign of a good puzzle but is also indicative of a bad piece of analysis. Attributing action to a “need” does no more than restate its existence.
Certainly, there’s an overlap between these forms of puzzle. Georges Perec constructed crosswords for Le Point newspaper and frames his experimental novel La Vie mode d’emploi using jigsaws; the pioneering cryptic constructor Torquemada, also a critic, reviewed 1,200 detective novels over four years; and Edgar Allan Poe, the godfather of the mystery story, concealed such elaborate messages in his poetry that some verses are practically double acrostics.
For some commentators, what all these forms of puzzle have in common is that they are a waste of time. In his epic English History 1914–1945, the historian A. J. P. Taylor finds a little value in detective fiction for providing “accurate social detail” for the historian of the period, then dismisses the genre as “[otherwise] without significance: an intellectual game like the crosswords, which became a universal feature in the newspapers at this time.” His counterpart A. N. Wilson goes further in his book The Victorians:
The cryptic crossword and the whodunit mystery story were two distinctive products of their time, expressions no doubt of the belief that if one could only worry at a problem for long enough it would have a single simple solution: Keynesian or Marxist economic theory, Roman Catholic, communist or fascist doctrine.
The connection sounds neat enough, but it doesn’t stand up. A decent crossword is the very opposite of simplistic: Its whole appeal is based on the ambiguity of language and on the solver’s skepticism about what is going on. Likewise, not all detective yarns provide the simple solutions that Wilson discerns, as can testify anyone who has tried to puzzle out who killed the chauffeur Owen Taylor in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—including Chandler himself, who was asked that question by the team adapting his novel for the screen and had to admit ignorance.
Stephen Sondheim—unofficial US ambassador for the cryptic and himself the creator of stage whodunit Getting Away with Murder and coauthor of the ludic murder-mystery movie The Last of Sheila—saw a similar affinity, but thought this was something to be celebrated.
“A good clue,” he insisted, “can give you all the pleasures of being duped that a mystery story can.” Among those pleasures are apparent innocence, surprise, and the catharsis of exposing what has really been going on. Sondheim proved his point when he constructed a puzzle titled “Murder Mystery” in which the clues took the form of missing words in a miniature narrative:
“I suggest we step into the study, where the victim’s flight from the murderer began, to 40A(3) if his desk will 44A(5) us further clues.”
The constructor as whodunit writer? Sure, why not? Both, if they wish to dodge charges of unfairness, must give all the necessary information such that the “solution” will make sense in retrospect. Both must avoid making this too obvious, and both are probably more prone to making it too arcane. Novice constructors have a tendency to write clues that make perfect sense to themselves but prove impenetrable to solvers.
Agatha Christie seemed to be talking about her own craft in the novel Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? when she had Lady Frances Derwent muse on a clue to a murder given by another character. “It’s like making crossword puzzles,” she remarks. “You write down a clue and you think it’s too idiotically simple and that everyone will guess it straight off, and you’re frightfully surprised when they simply can’t get it in the least.”
The affection has long been mutual, with mystery writers weaving fictional crossword puzzles into their plots for a century. In 1928, Dorothy L. Sayers’s nobleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey begins the story “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will” flouncing around in silk pajamas, his every step “a conscious act of enjoyment,” helping his butler with a clue.
The plot concerns a young woman who has begun experimenting with socialism. Her late uncle had been of the firm conviction that a “woman who pretends to be serious is wasting her time and spoiling her appearance,” so he resolved to teach this young woman a lesson by favoring her in his will but obscuring the contents of the document in crossword form.
It is only when Lord Peter falls into Uncle Meleager’s pond—or, as Sayers has it, his impluvium—that he finds the grid on its watery square-tiled floor. The puzzle is reproduced in the story; it goes beyond cryptics in its esotericism and is not for the faint of heart. Here is a sample clue, which will be part Greek to many readers:
2.VI. “Bid ’ον και μη ’ον farewell?” Nay, in this
The sterner Roman stands by that which is.
...and the annotated solution Sayers provides at the end of the book with the completed grid . . .
2.VI. EST: ’ον και μη ’ον = est and non est—the problem of being and not-being. Ref. Marlowe: Doctor Faustus I.1.
Sorry? Sorry. More traditional and accessible fare is to be found in tales such as Vincent Fuller’s 1925 potboiler The Long Green Gaze: A Crossword Puzzle Mystery, where the suspects in a poisoning case communicate with one another using crossword clues and the answers are given at the end in a sealed section. Likewise in the same year’s Crime of the Crossword by John Garland, a trader in floor tiles is murdered and the arrangement of some of his tiles relates to a set of clues.
Since then, authors have reveled in titles along the lines of A Six-Letter Word for Death (Patricia Moyes, 1983) and With This Puzzle, I Thee Kill and You Have the Right to Remain Puzzled (Parnell Hall, 2003 and 2006). The best of the subgenre is Herbert Resnicow’s Murder Across and Down, in which the killer of a crossword constructor is revealed by a series of dastardly puzzles set by the relentlessly ingenious real-life puzzler Henry Hook.
The crosswordiest tec, though, remains Inspector Morse, the creation of Colin Dexter, himself a crossword constructor. Dexter named his detective, Morse’s sidekick Lewis, and many murder suspects after fellow solvers who repeatedly beat him in the monthly clue-writing competition in British Sunday paper The Observer.
Dexter not only made Morse a solver—one so addicted that he puts time aside for the fearsome Listener puzzle (see the SONDHEIM chapter above); he also makes crossword solving a vital part of the detective’s tool kit.
In the story The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, Morse has been trying to establish which of the suspects in a murder case might have visited a cinema to see a pornographic film. He takes the time out to solve the London Times’s puzzle, taking an impressive twelve and a half minutes; he would have been within ten minutes but for the clue “In which are the Islets of Langerhans (8),” for which he has —A—C—E—S.
When the inspector twigs that the constructor is trying to make him conjure up a sea that fits those letters rather than PANCREAS, he sees that the suspects had been acting like a crossword constructor: trying to make him work out who had been in the cinema when nobody had been there at all.
(It’s a reminder that solving of both the recreational type and the crime-fighting professional variety works best when it does not pick up merely on the clues that are provided—indeed, it is most satisfying and rewarding when what appears to be a clue is in fact a red herring. Identifying what you are not being told, deducing what you are being induced—misleadingly—to infer. An invaluable side effect of solving and certainly, very far from simplistic. Whodunits have provided some of the most ingenious crosswords in the first hundred years of the puzzle. The puzzle that should be remembered as the best of all likewise appeared in fictional form—but this one was not in a mystery story; neither was it wholly fictional . . .)