Australian Crosswords

A short time back I did a piece on what I knew of the NZ crossword industry. As a part of preparing the item, I contacted some of the people mentioned to double-check I had my facts straight. Two of the people, David Tossman and Rex Benson, I had met in Wellington a few years ago, but the other, Paul Henderson, I hadn’t communicated with before. I started up a conversation with Paul and remarked about Wellington being the centre of cryptics in NZ, and asked whether he had met either David or Rex. Long story short, the three Wellington-based crossword setters met for coffee not long after and I believe it was a pleasant time. The meeting led Paul Henderson to write some blog entries about NZ’s crossword scene, something he wasn’t fully familiar with due to his history of involvement with UK cryptics. The results are in two parts, and are well worth a read.

Phi Online Blog Part 1

Phi Online Blog Part 2

A former member of the ACC, Gizmo, told me a story once of his attempt to be included on the roster of setters of a well-known newspaper group, or at least, to join the list of those waiting in the wings. His contact at the newspaper group passed a sample from Gizmo onto some incumbent setters who completed the puzzle and responded with comments. On the whole the feedback was positive but a number of negatives were pointed out. Among them, and apparently mentioned by all those who tried his puzzle, was the use of “definition‘s” at the start of a clue. Such devices interest me because I believe nothing gets into a cryptic clue/crossword without at least some form of acceptance at some level by someone. That is, someone considered it OK to use, so there must be explainable justification. And there is. The question, though, is how complicated is that explanation and how hard would it be for a setter to explain or a solver to deduce? Any difficulty, IMO, kills a device for me. Some such devices have become ingrained and accepted, others that are actually OK, like this one, get pooh-poohed due to lack of understanding. Here, the “‘s” isn’t possessive but an abbreviation for “is” or “has” (definition is/has), the latter I don’t like as a linker but still it can be interpreted that way. The “‘s” topic popped up on Derek Harrison’s Message Board but solely when used as “has” in wordplay to join components. You’ll notice its use this way was not universally accepted, but ultimately (after a bit of effort) an example was found to justify its use in this manner. (I don’t like it from a grammatical point-of-view, so I don’t use it). It’s the unobvious nature of this device when used in the wordplay part that makes it questionable for me – just imagine trying to explain it to a newbie. Of course, if you see it used often enough it becomes acceptable even if not fully understood, but that makes it deficient IMO. In the case of Gizmo, the setters who attempted his sample cryptic clearly hadn’t understood how “definition‘s” worked, and even though it’s perfectly acceptable as a substitute for “is” and “has” at the start of a clue, they flagged its use as faulty.

A while back I received an email from an old Stickler fan lamenting the loss of decent cryptics from the papers and complaining about the inevitable move away from the printed medium. He said he would love to do The Stickler Weekly but wasn’t tech-savvy and had no desire to become so. He suggested a service where I would print a month’s worth of puzzles at a time and send them to him. He was happy to pay for the expense of doing this and indicated that other people might be interested in doing the same thing. I suspect that there are people out there in the same boat, however, with no way to reach solvers except through the internet, it seems I’m caught in a Catch-22 situation.
I assume if you have friends who prefer doing The Stickler Weekly on paper then you are downloading the PDF and printing it off for them, so my current solver base probably isn’t a good source for partakers of a print-and-send service.
I’d gladly do something in this area if enough people were interested but how to reach them? Any suggestions? Any comments?