Australian Crosswords

I’ve been writing cryptics for about 25 years. I’ve written for a staff magazine, CrOzworld, websites, puzzle magazines and, of course, newspapers. Along the way I’ve done crosswords for magazines that feature gardening, fishing, 4WDs and medicine. While all of these publications have editors, very few have editors or personnel with a sufficient knowledge of cryptics to challenge what I write or make suggestions about changing clues. You might think this is good for me, and in most cases, you’d be right, but I don’t think it’s a good thing for cryptics in general. A crossword editor provides a mechanism to identify faulty clues and brings consistency of style and difficulty across setters. Surely anything goes if there’s no crossword editor between a setter and the published work? Ultimately, some may say, the solvers act as de facto crossword editors through their feedback, but in my experience most solvers are reluctant to take a stand fearing that they have “missed something”. Thus, a setter may get unofficial approval when in fact a crossword editor would have intervened. That’s a dangerous trend going forward.
As you know, The Stickler Weekly, just like the newspaper version, The Stickler, doesn’t have an editor – it’s just me. I do a couple of things to self-check, like go through clues after not seeing them for a while, but I always have the solution available, so it’s just not like solving as a normal solver would. So I feel the crossword isn’t as consistent as it would be with the checks and balances that a proper cryptic crossword editor would provide. To some extent, we setters wear blinkers when we check our own work.
A few weeks ago a NZ setter, David Tossman, wrote a short piece on one of his clues that contained one definition and two anagrams. It wasn’t the clue that struck me, but his explanation of the different construction and his justification for using it:
“I think looser rules can apply with easier puzzles such as this. Anyway, restraint and parsimony being against my nature, I simply couldn’t resist the way the two anagrams work here.”
Setters can easily deceive themselves because the answer is in front of them. When they read a clue and look at the answer, of course it all works perfectly. An extra anagram works because it also provides the answer – in effect giving the solver more ways to get there. But is that how the solver sees it? I suspect not, as the setter hasn’t indicated what’s going on. The solver would have every right to assume the entire wordplay leads to a single answer, as it does in 99.9% of cases, so the extra bits just add confusion, IMO. While the setter was aiming to provide extra wordplay to make a clue easier, they may in fact have just complicated the issue. The same applies to triple definitions – not good setting, just extra content that could cause confusion. All well-intentioned but executed with a bias eye.

Have you ever wondered why more people aren’t enthralled by cryptic crosswords? I don’t just mean younger generations – why is it your friends and family aren’t hanging out each day for the latest cryptic challenge? I bet many of them enjoy “normal” crosswords, so why is it they don’t naturally migrate to cryptics over time? I remember being taught how to solve The Guardian cryptic in the Sun-Herald in year 10 (at 15 years old) by my English teacher – he not only taught us every school week how to solve but questions on cryptics turned up in term tests and the end-of-year exam. There was a big incentive to learn how do them yet a relatively small number of us actually enjoyed this part of his English curriculum. I think the same goes in the population generally: not everyone thinks the right way necessary to crack cryptics, even though they are quite comfortable with all other kinds of word puzzles. I’ve always believed a maths bent helped me embrace and get good at solving, and I think the fact that English was my worst subject (marks-wise) in senior school bears that out. Recently the results of a study by Kathryn Friedlander and Philip Fine from University of Buckingham confirmed that cryptic solvers and solvers of advanced cryptics in particular are more likely to have a science/maths background. Have a look at the study here. I must warn you that it’s academic in nature and not a relaxing read, but the findings are interesting. The researchers used info from questionnaires filled in by solvers sourced through various crossword-related websites. I’m not sure if the numbers tell us about how many people are actually solving crosswords compared to years gone by, but it does tell us quite a lot about the age-groups of current solvers (who are internet-savvy), and their make-up.
I was thinking of running a small anonymous survey on this website about crossword things – who’d like to participate?

While Australia has been solving cryptics for just about as long as anywhere else in the world, we have never really embraced them to the extent that we would say they are part of our culture. Say “have you done the crossword today?” to an English person and they will automatically take that as a reference to a cryptic crossword. It’s not so here. Our crossword history reveals a story of imports and very few crossword heroes. Lack of newspaper publications means not many opportunities for local setters although Fairfax has been faithful in their support of Australian cryptic crosswords. We setters are few, and the same goes for our counterparts in New Zealand. Their crossword history mirrors ours, with just a handful of NZ setters flying the flag at home. A few years ago I met two NZ setters in Wellington, David and Rex, and they kindly showed my wife and I around the city for a day. Rex writes the weekly Kropotkin crossword in the New Zealand Herald (help can be found here), and David writes a weekly cryptic for the NZ Listener (worked answers can be found here). It was David’s treatment of the solution, that includes a specific layout and cryptic comment, that inspired the equivalent on my website. Apart from those two, Jim Greenfield sets cryptics that appear in NZ papers, Barbara Brown sets a weekly cryptic for the Christchurch daily The Press (blog here), and Maya sets for various websites (see his puzzles here).
I can’t talk about NZ setters without mentioning yet another one who lives in Wellington, Paul Henderson, but he’s special because he’s not a Kiwi, but an Englishman living and working in NZ. He sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi and Beelzebub, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. More details can be found here. As far as I know, he doesn’t write crosswords for any NZ publications.
It’s tough going for Oz and NZ setters, and it’s only going to get harder as outlets shrink and the internet reduces the number of crosswords needed to service the solvers, but we plug away, not for the money, but to try and bring a home-grown flavour to a market flooded with foreign influences.