Late August became open season in the Guardian letters page for shooting cryptic puzzles for not being what they were in the good old days. The onslaught was triggered by a letter published on 23 August. Next day there were a couple more in the same vein. But it was on 26 August that the massed guns were launched. A large section of the letters page that day was given over to the battle. In case you missed it, you can recapture the action by clicking on: https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/2016/aug/26/cryptic-crosswords-im-sorry-i-havent-a-clue.
Aware that younger solvers and all of our growing number of overseas readers do the crosswords online and do not pay to buy the paper, I checked that admirable site Fifteen Squared, where the British ‘broadsheet’ cryptic puzzles are independently monitored each day, to see what comments were being registered there. I found that Sil van den Hoek had posted a comment on 28 August to the effect that he found the collection of letters published in the Guardian two days earlier to be odd. His comment has since attracted 93 further responses. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since the Fifteen Squared site is most used by regular online crossword enthusiasts, these 93 comments are almost as universally in favour of the Guardian Cryptic as the letters in the paper were critical. The van den Hoek collection can be seen at: http://www.fifteensquared.net/2016/08/28/the-guardian-letters-27-08-2106-i-havent-a-clue/.
I tend to be wary of those who look at the past and find it rose-tinted. Of course, like anything else if it is to survive and prosper, the cryptic puzzle has to evolve over time. Araucaria has deservedly joined the pantheon of all-time great setters, though many crossword luminaries like Colin Dexter and Jeremy Morse were pretty snooty about his cluing when he was still active. His bank holiday jumbo specials were of the highest quality but people seem to have forgotten that they were every bit as intricate as those that Maskarade is currently producing. When I became crossword editor in 1997 Paul, who is now an established Guardian favourite, had many vociferous critics. The much-lamented Bunthorne could never have been described as a setter of easier puzzles than, say, Puck or Picaroon today. As to the tricks of the trade, they too have developed and changed. But it is certainly much easier now than it was then for tyro solvers to learn about them. If you are stuck today on a particular clue, a note of explanation is provided by the excellent commentators at http://www.fifteensquared.net.
I inherited a policy that, in principle, each week of Guardian Cryptics should contain two average, two easier and two more difficult puzzles. In the first six months of this year we published 156 cryptic puzzles. It is subjective to classify a particular setter as difficult or easy and some, notably Paul like Araucaria before him, slips the odd easier puzzle in with his other deliveries. But, suppose you allow that Arachne, Brendan, Chifonie, Nutmeg, Orlando, Rufus and Shed are towards the more non-devious end of the spectrum, in these six months 49 of their puzzles were published, just three short of a third of the total. Of those, 19 were by Rufus, by far the most regularly published setter apart from Paul.
In short, although things have indeed changed over the past 20 years, it is perhaps surprising, given the changes in the demographic of our crossword solvers and the changes in language and technology, that they have not been greater.
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Many of you will be familiar with Eric Westbrook’s extraordinary 3-D crossword puzzle calendars, produced in aid of BBC Children in Need and the Royal National Institute of Blind People. It is planned that there should again be a calendar for 2017, but this year the monthly puzzles are just available online. The puzzle for this September is promoted as being 3-D ‘but with an added 4-D element’. The Guardian’s Puck has been closely involved in producing this September puzzle. You can download it by going to http://www.calendarpuzzles.co.uk/puzzle_downloads.php and selecting the Puzzle and Answer Grid buttons for September. Downloading is free, though you are offered the option of making a contribution to charity. The deadline is the last day of September and, for every correct entry received, £1 will be donated to Air Ambulance and the John Radcliffe Hospital in memory of Ray Parry-Morris, one of the grid designers for the 3-D puzzles, who died last month after a short illness.
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We have continued to have problems over the summer with uploading the Genius puzzle at the right time and with the correct format. It has not yet been possible to include it in the new system for handling the other puzzles. As a result it still has to be loaded ‘manually’ and it cannot be properly checked until it has gone live. However, the September Genius by Jack seems to have been without problem, so my fingers are crossed for the future.
June’s Genius No 156, Pasquale’s midsummer puzzle, attracted a large number of first-day entries (51) and 295 in total by the deadline. ‘jeremy@g’ was first in at 01:28, followed 50 minutes later by ‘psc’ from Australia and ‘m1f’.
No 157 by Picaroon for July got off to a bad start and so had only 14 entries on the first day. There were 230 in total by the deadline. ‘mark.n’ was first in at 10:03, followed by ‘hookt’ at 10:07 and ‘don@demon’ at 10:40.
You seem to have found No 158 for July by Paul the hardest of these three, with 10 in on the first day and only 181 in total. ‘m1f’ was first in at 04:36, followed by ‘fg@yahoo’ at 13:13.
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