Australian Crosswords

Last week an Australian Financial Review (AFR) cryptic solver, Martin Smith, posted about elements of recent AFR cryptic that he wasn’t happy with. His main beef was the use of unusual or unknown words, causing him to be disappointed by my efforts. It turned out that there were three words, one in each of the last three AFR cryptics that he didn’t know and had failed his test of acceptance, a generic program called spellcheck. I responded privately to the poster, in essence saying that it wasn’t possible to write crosswords at any level with a guarantee that all solvers would know all the answers. In fact, that tended not to matter anyway because thankfully cryptic clues almost always give you two ways to get an answer, and a well-written wordplay can get you there even if you don’t know the word! This was key for me as a teenager doing the Guardian – I didn’t know half the answer words but was still able to nut out the answers. For me, and I suspect, a large number of people, solving from the wordplay alone is a real buzz and one of the joys of being a cryptic solver. As a setter, I know I’ve done my job well if someone says they found the answer through the wordplay and learnt a new word. Two of the three concerned poster’s unusual/unknown words (BISHOPRIC, IGUANODON) are in my concise dictionaries and the other word (CAMELEER) is in all my references. As far as spellcheck goes, it varies from app to app, so it didn’t surprise me to find the word he complained about the most (IGUANODON) passed the MS Word spellcheck on my PC. I’m very careful about the words I use in any puzzle, making sure that the overall result has some kind of balance. As the AFR is a weekly puzzle, there’s more scope in this area as in theory solvers have lots of time to work things out. However, a setter can go overboard in this area, as regularly happens with the Sun-Herald‘s cryptic crossword, written, I believe, by Russel Jessop based on his father’s (Noel Jessop) collection of clues. The result is a strange mixture of clues and some really obscure answers, including some that only appear in Chambers. Here are some answers from last week’s crossword: ONAGERS, DYAK, AMERCED, YESKS, and THEA. Martin Smith wouldn’t like this crossword at all!
It’s not uncommon for the odd solver to complain about something I’ve done, often, I think, they are annoyed they couldn’t work out an answer without help, but this post had more to it. The poster listed their age as 26, and I started to wonder whether this person might be considered part of a modern-age group of solvers, with their main tool a mobile phone or tablet. I imagine the modern solver to be time-poor, keen to finish the crossword in one sitting – none of this take all week to solve it or chip away at it for a number of days. This would explain the lack of patience in working on the wordplays to find answers. They also have various online and maybe app tools available to look things up or find a list of possible answers through letter pattern-matching software. This would explain the use of “spellcheck” as a word-guide and the “cheating” that the poster felt they needed to do to get the answers. It’s also possible they grew up solving crosswords that had clues with poor wordplays and most of the answers were derived from definitions alone. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not criticising the poster’s approach, just that it seems the modern solver thinks of cryptic clues in a different way and has a different approach to solvers in the past. This is something I have to ponder and adjust to if I want my crosswords to continue to be relevant.

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?