Australian Crosswords

As a former full-time professional crossword setter, I was in an elite bunch (bunch might be overstating it). Very few people around the world, let alone Australia, make their living writing crosswords alone. Opportunities arose occasionally that required an expert in the field, and I was targeted a number of times to get involved with crossword-related projects.
In 2003 I was approached by a farmer from SA who had thought up a crossword board game while convalescing in hospital after an accident. He and his brother wanted to meet me in Sydney to discuss my involvement and possibly (if I passed muster) show me a mock-up of the game. Our meeting went well and, after signing a non-disclosure agreement, I saw the game and was taken through the rules and how the gameplay was supposed to work. This was exciting and I could see immediately how I could contribute in a number of different areas. The game designers essentially wanted me to create grids and clues that were appropriate for how the game worked, but it was clear my ongoing expertise would be needed so we came to an arrangement where I would be paid at a reduced rate for the crosswords and I would also receive a share of profits. The game designers engaged an Australian game developing company through the internet to take the game to a prototype stage that could be used as a template for manufacturing. The whole process was planned to take a number of months and cost a significant amount of money.
Although I was kept in the loop regarding rules and gameplay changes etc, I wasn’t involved with the interaction between the designers and developers – my main focus was the crosswords and clues to be used in the two planned versions of the game targeting different age-groups. There was a lot to do – specially-designed grids with non-standard numbering and clues that were crucial to how the game worked, all to be delivered in a format that was easy to understand and assemble.
I had no idea things weren’t going well until I was notified that development had stalled due to a disagreement over the amount of progress for the money spent. Basically the prototype was nowhere near finished, and what had been done was of average quality.
My emails of the period show this all took place in 2003 and what followed was claims and counter claims between designer and developer first via email then the lawyers got involved. In 2005 an independent report was commissioned by the designers to examine the project. In 2006 the report was completed which favoured the designers, claiming they had paid three times the going rate and had received substandard prototypes. It was hoped that this would be enough to get some resolution. Some time later I received a phone call informing me that the designers were cutting their losses and closing the door on the crossword game for good.
This is a sad story – everyone missed out but the developers – me, the designers and the crossword-solving public and a really good idea went by the wayside. I perhaps should have charged my full fee at the beginning, but I believed in the game and wanted to be part of it.
Unfortunately this isn’t the only crossword venture that has come to nought. More in coming weeks.

This week I had planned to tell you about a crossword venture that I got involved with in 2003, then I came across something on the web that changed my mind. Last week I stated that I had to be careful about what I said as a professional crossword setter since my livelihood could depend on it. Well, I’m going to break my own rules and talk about an excerpt from the preface to Mungo MacCallum’s new crossword book published on The Saturday Paper website.
The excerpt presents a potted history of the (cryptic) crossword and MacCallum’s association with it. While I can’t argue with the latter, I can set a few things straight regarding that first period of crossword emergence that resulted in the birth of the cryptic. MacCallum is a professional journalist and no doubt wouldn’t write anything in the media without fact-checking. Wrong statements simply destroy the credibility of the whole piece. MacCallum says:

“He (Arthur Wynne) called it a word-cross puzzle, but the term crossword, as a single term, had been used for at least 50 years before.”

From my research that included reading The Centenary of the Crossword (2013) by John Halpern, a leading UK setter, there’s no evidence to support this. The term “Cross-word” appeared shortly after “Word-Cross” in the New York World, which makes sense since they were the only ones publishing crosswords in the US at the time. MacCallum goes on:

“The modern cryptic evolved mainly in England, and by the end of the First World War it had become a regular event in the major dailies.”

Wow, fire that researcher! This is so wrong, and throws the legitimacy of the whole book into question. Could the same person who wrote this craft a good cryptic crossword? The first crossword of any kind wasn’t published in a UK newspaper until November, 1924. It would be decades in most cases that crosswords appeared daily, up to then it was mostly weekly. The Sydney Morning Herald didn’t publish a daily cryptic until 1954! The cryptic itself doesn’t have a definitive timeline (there’s no first official full cryptic), but cryptic elements were apparent as puns from the early days. It’s safe to say that cryptic components became more widespread in the 1930s (in the UK and Oz mainly) and eventually, over many years, whole cryptic crosswords were produced. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the “rules” (or “old rules” as MacCallum puts it) were put in writing and generally accepted in the book Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966) by D.S. MacNutt.
At this point in my reading of the excerpt I was finding it hard to take anything written seriously. What followed, though, I found offensive, as MacCallum dismissed one of Australia’s crossword greats, Noel Jessop, as simply “a longstanding, if somewhat old-fashioned, stalwart”. He didn’t have the courage or decency to name the man he replaced at The Bulletin. Australia has had only a few crossword pioneers and Noel Jessop is one of them and is entitled to some respect and acknowledgement.
I have to admit I haven’t done a Mungo cryptic since his days in The Bulletin, but if the inaccuracies in this extract are indicative of the attention to detail given to his cryptics (and let’s face it, all crosswords should be accurate), then his book won’t be worth buying.

If you are a regular reader of the Stickler Weekly Solutions you’ll know that I often refer to articles, blogs, crosswords, clues etc from around the globe. As a rule, I don’t always identify authors of clues due largely to my position as a professional crossword setter. It depends solely on whether my thoughts could be considered to be overly-critical of setters or crosswords. Unlike a solver who can demand the best from their newspaper, I must view every crossword as the property of a publisher and a source of current or future work. The very fact that a crossword is published is an endorsement of that crossword (and the setter) and any questioning of the quality or otherwise would be a questioning of the publisher’s decision to run that crossword. In other words, knock the crossword and you knock the publisher. It’s fine and appropriate (and necessary) for solvers to do this, but not me. So if you see something mentioned without a direct reference, this is why. I want to use real clues to make a point, but I don’t want to intentionally upset anyone. Without this restraint, who knows what I might say?