Australian Crosswords

When I first joined the Australian Crossword Club (ACC) in the early 1990s, there were some super solvers in the group, ones that never made a mistake with their answers to the monthly crosswords in the ACC’s publication, CrOzworld. I asked one of them at an annual get-together if they’d ever had a go at writing clues instead of solving them, and the response was an emphatic “no”, stating that she wouldn’t know where to start. I think most solvers “have a go” maybe with the odd original clue or by trying to improve on somebody else’s clue, but very few solvers have the mind to take a word and reconstruct it as coherent pieces rather than just put the pieces together. It does take practice and trial and error, of course, but it is a different way of thinking.
I regularly get asked about the crosswords I solve and my crossword-solving ability, and recently this started me thinking whether all good setters are good solvers and whether all good solvers would make good setters. The latter I’ve answered, no, being a good solver isn’t a guarantee that you’d write good cryptics, however, I do believe the former is true: good setters invariably are good, if not great, solvers. First, most newbie setters take the plunge largely because solving has become too easy for them, and they are looking for something more from the hobby – it’s not a natural progression though, just as an avid reader rarely has a go at writing. Setters and solvers need to be able to view a word as its components, but a setter must also be able to manufacture a grammatical process to put the components together to form an answer. Only those with an excellent understanding of the workings of cryptic clues can do this – that is, experienced solvers.
I’m happy to be challenged on this – do you know a good setter who confesses that they aren’t (or once were) a good solver?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the words “scandal” and “crosswords” used in the same sentence before. A few days ago, an article rocked the US crossword community, claiming plagiarism of massive proportions. Before I comment on the story, I need to explain some things about US non-cryptic crosswords. First, they are a special breed with a set formula of sorts. They have very few black squares compared to the average cryptic grid and every square is cross-checked, meaning that if you solve all the across clues OR all the down clues then you’ve solved the crossword. But for this story to have any traction, this last factor – the inclusion of a theme – is paramount. For most US big-paper crosswords, a theme is a central feature – at least the longest answers MUST be devoted to the theme. It’s largely the themes that enabled the plagiarism to be exposed. In a nutshell it’s alleged that the themes were copied in their entirety, and sometimes the clues to the theme words as well. In other cases the bulk of a crossword was copied and whole crosswords were republished under different names. The person at the centre of the controversy is Timothy Parker who edits syndicated Universal Uclick crosswords. He also has dealings with USA Today. The article details the apparent reuse of themes largely from the New York Times and crosswords edited by Timothy Parker. The reuse discovery was made via a database of 1000s of puzzles going back over more than 10 years. Simply, it was possible to compare puzzles with a few database queries. So far Timothy Parker has suggested that the reuse is just coincidence and it will be hard to argue against it due to the way crosswords are built and the computerised fill that happens around theme words. It’s harder to explain identical themes AND clues, but almost impossible to prove there was any willful intent to deceive solvers. One thing’s for sure, Timothy Parker’s job just got a whole lot harder as everything published by him from now on will be heavily scrutinised.
So, what about a similar thing happening here in Oz or the UK? Non-cryptic, quick crosswords are largely rehashed words and clues just in different combinations. It would be easy to recycle these as they have nothing distinctive about them – no theme, and usually very little content that dates them. This is intentional, BTW, as many of these types of crosswords are designed to be syndicated which means they have to be as generic as possible. Cryptics are different, of course, due to the lengthy nature of clues written by a particular setter. It would be hard to claim coincidence if a clue was reused by another setter verbatim, although it wouldn’t be an impossibility. Style plays a role, making identical construction unlikely, but some answers just lend themselves to a set construction. It is common, however, to see the same (clever) idea repeated by another setter in their own words. Sometimes this is accidental, other times not.
The Australian Crossword Club (ACC) once repeated a crossword in their magazine by mistake only a couple of months apart. Very few members realised the error, most just re-solved it and submitted their entry. It goes to show that even if there was reuse, it wouldn’t stand out to the majority of solvers who probably solve many crosswords a week and don’t remember specifics about any one crossword. The late Shirl O’Brien, who set for the ACC, The Courier Mail and The Guardian, when asked about reusing a clue once told me that if she had to, she’d make sure it was an ordinary clue.