Australian Crosswords

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?

You may have heard of the term “crosswordese” which is the stuff that is only used in crosswords (normal and cryptic). It ranges from the use of a question mark to indicate “word abuse” to terms like “perhaps” which gets used as an anagram indicator. A subset of crosswordese is “cryptic cliches” which comprises terms that are almost always instantly recognisable for what they represent. Some examples: “Learner” = L; “revolutionary” = CHE; “(religious) book(s)” = OT/NT etc. In some ways they are boring, but totally necessary. The hardest part of solving a cryptic is at the start where there’s no/minimal help from crossing answers. Cryptic cliches help solvers get starts in clues, and I have no doubt solvers look for, and to some extent, rely on, these cryptic keywords. Of course setters should be aware of this and can control how much help they provide across the entire crossword by judicious use of these footholds.
New and lazy setters may default to constructing clues with multiple cryptic cliches – it’s the easy way out just to build a clue from basic, common pieces. Here’s an example:

Ear specialist love to look at soldier’s bone? (9)   O + TO + LO + GIS + T

There are no fewer than four cryptic cliches used in this clue! “love” = O (tennis); “look at” = LO (archaic); “soldier’s” = GI’S (American soldier) and “bone” = T (T-bone). While all of these get used regularly by some setters I no longer use LO due to its limited present-day use and close association with “look” and T isn’t a bone IMO. Note three other things about this clue: it’s grammatically incorrect (should be “loves”) there’s a “?” (indicating what?) and it’s easy to solve. Ultimately this last quality may be the main driver for how the clue is constructed and what makes it acceptable to the solving public.

Note that cryptic cliches can also be used to trick solvers, as they are almost always words/terms that have multiple meanings. So beware.