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Update 13 June

June 13, 2015 By Phixwd 3 Comments

This is a tale of three Ninas.

This weekend sees two of my puzzles being blogged more or less simultaneously on fifteensquared, a consequence of having the Saturday prize puzzle last week and back to my usual Friday slot this week.  They have different Ninas – and obviously they involve different thematic  material, but they are, to me, at least, different in concept as well.  (We’ll come to the third Nina in due course.)

Last week’s Nina was born of the usual dread – how do I start filling a grid?  As so often, I solved the problem by turning to a ready-made list of words.  In this case, it occurred to me that I might use the names of race-winning horses.  These often have somewhat ridiculous names, of course – Sire: The Venetian; Dam: Daisy-cutter; Progeny: Blind Mowing, that sort of thing (and there have been crosswords based on that sort of thing).  But when I fetched up on the Wikipedia page for Derby winners, I found a rather fine list of single-word dictionary-entry horses in the years from 1801 onwards.  There are ten from 1801-50 in the grid, and there were more I could have chosen.  I filled what turned out to be a rather standard-looking grid, and, as is my habit, put it aside for a while.

Once I’d clued it and was getting ready to send it to the editor, it occurred to me to check when exactly the 2015 Derby was being run.  It turned out to be only a couple of weeks after the initial scheduled date for the puzzle, so a bit of judicious rearrangement, and there we were.  I don’t know that I ever expected anyone to make the connection, but Mike carefully put a non-date-related puzzle in my usual Friday slot, with the aim of hinting that it was my puzzle that had moved to an appropriate date.

The West Side Story puzzle which came along a few weeks later was just a happy thought as I considered the names of the characters.  I hadn’t even been listening to the piece, and I don’t know where the idea of it came from.  It certainly helped that Tony and Maria, the main protagonists, have names that have other dictionary meanings, and the gang members’ nicknames were good fodder too – in fact, they were mostly quite short, which enabled me to get four for each gang in.  The title itself had 13 letters so it went down the middle column and the Jets went on one side and the Sharks on the other, the same numbers of each, of course.   One might have thought that the combined word wizardry of Messrs Laurents, Bernstein and Sondheim might have avoided having Tiger as a Jet, but no.  (But maybe it’s a sort of joke.)

With this sort of Nina, a lot of thematic material presents itself at the outset, without much need for digging, though also with only a limited number of options.  The grid, as a result, tends to have a more obvious ‘Here be hidden messages’ feel.  As many bloggers note, the presence of unchecked letters around all or some of the perimeter is often a good hint that ‘something is going on’.  On the other hand, getting a Nina into the sort of grid that newspapers would more-or-less automatically consider adding to their stock of standard grids (if such they have) is more satisfying.

So don’t let next week’s four-way symmetric, closely-interlocked grid fool you.  I put seven thematic entries into it, and [expletive] if when I came to clue it I didn’t spot an eighth.  And it was really rather pleasant to see so innocuous a grid containing something rather more nocuous. But Independent solvers are clean-minded souls, so I imagine they’ll miss it.

Which sort of brings me to this week’s puzzle which is an Enigmatic Variations grid from 2003.  I remember filling the grid and sitting back and looking  at it, and slowly realising that, without really thinking about it, I had ended up with a standard sort of 12×12 Beelzebub type grid (in fact, it has only 34 entries).  I couldn’t even see a ready way of opening it up to squeeze in more thematic material, so there it stayed.

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Comments

  1. WILLIAM F P says

    June 14, 2015 at 3:42 am

    I often wonder whether these really are Ninas (like your clever constructions genuinely ‘hidden’ within the grid, as an acrostic in the clues and such like) or rather ‘themes’ – hidden or otherwise…..

    Reply
    • Phixwd says

      June 14, 2015 at 11:21 am

      I think it’s the case that Nina is used because it’s shorter than everything else we call them! The Hob puzzle that took over ‘my’ Friday slot had a Nina in that there was a perimeter message/quote. The Derby winners puzzle was what I’ve called a ‘ghost theme‘ where you didn’t need to see it to be able to solve the puzzle. Even the West Side Story puzzle is a sort of ghost theme in that it would be possible to fill the grid without ever twigging the thematic references. However, even a basic familiarity with what is a well-known piece would alert people to JET or SHARK or TONY or MARIA, so that ghost would be pretty well observed.
      If, on the other hand, I put in COMPOSER at 11 across, and reference ’11’ in several other clues then that is an overt theme. Still valid, I’d say, as there are plenty of such categories where a decent general knowledge (combined with good wordplay indications) should carry the solver through – but it’s not done so often at the moment. So I suppose I ought to do another one.
      But it’ll be called a Nina when it appears!

      Reply
      • William F P says

        June 16, 2015 at 11:44 pm

        Thanks for your thoughts. One can’t argue with your first sentence; brevity beats most in an answer.
        I suppose the romantic in me so likes the tale of Al Hirschfield’s little daughter Nina being hidden away in his illustrations (like our Wallies – now there’s a name we could make more of in crossworlds?!) that I prefer it being used to describe those tricks that are NOT themes….
        But then, what do I know?

        Reply

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About me

This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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