Phi Crosswords

After a few cold days, we are back up near 20C. Just as well since the heating’s out, possibly terminally. It’s a good day for gardening, so I shall be brief.

The puzzle this time is an unpublished Beelzebub from last year. The Sunday Times advertised for a new member of the Mephisto team, and this was my unsuccessful submission. As I’m not getting on any too rapidly with the current candidate for the unpublished Beelzebub slot (though it will come…), I thought I would put it up. It comes with an interactive solving option, as well as the usual PDF to print off.

A quiet start to June with just a Telegraph Toughie from Kcit on Thursday 8th to add to the Friday regulars in The Independent. 

The puzzle this time is from the BBC Music Magazine in early 2009. It was the 200th in the series and I allowed myself a little thematic element. Now, if all goes well, I’m looking at the 400th coming up next year, and I’m already wondering what I can do around that number.

Music often implies an audience which has me thinking about blogs again, especially as this week saw my puzzles appear in three different outlets. Pangakupu popped up in the Guardian on Wednesday (notification only received after last time’s update, alas), Phi was in his usual Friday slot in the Independent, and the Jumbo in Saturday’s Times was one of mine as well. I can’t talk about the last of those much, as it’s a prize puzzle. But the other two have been blogged – the Guardian in two locations, the Independent on fifteensquared.

As it happens, the Independent blogging view tended toward Friday’s being at the harder end of my spectrum, but the Guardian puzzle was definitely rated very hard, with lots of comments about complex constructions and so on. From my point of view I approach all clues as being for the word in question, not as a ‘word in a Guardian puzzle’ or a ‘word in a Toughie’. I do allow myself a greater range of dictionary reference in clues for a barred grid, but not for the daily or Jumbo blocked puzzles. Such puzzles, as far as I can tell, leave my desk being broadly uniform in style. What causes the difference in reception?

Do I unconsciously choose a different vocabulary for each outlet? By definition, I cannot answer that, but I cannot see how it could readily come about. The restrictions on choosing words for the grid relate to any grid – slightly more freedom at the Independent where I have the freedom to design my own. Still, the restrictions around avoiding double unchecked letters and having at least half the letters of every checked (most of the time…) are the same everywhere.

Is it the editing? Each editor is different, and it would be fair to say each outlet edits a different amount. But I doubt even the most significant editing is doing much in the area of difficulty – house style maybe, but actual difficulty not so much.

So we come to the expectations of the solvers. There are many people who solve puzzles in different papers, but I also think each paper has its devotees. This drifts back to a more generalised view of the editing, in that the expectations of the devotees will have been formed over the years by a succession of editors.  But puzzles remain the creation of their setters, especially where a pseudonym is used – whatever general style is expected must be allowed to vary to accommodate individuals.  A Times editor resisted the use of pseudonyms by observing that it would simply encourage people to grumble ‘Oh, not X again!’.  But that seems part of the creative game – you aren’t expected to like everyone and everything, and a newspaper can have both a style and a broad-based approach that allows that style to be challenged at times.

Styles being challenged over the next fortnight: Independent on Fridays, with a Times daily on Monday 22nd and a Times Quick on Thursday 25th. Which in turn means I have to be off to write some clues.

 
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Alas, this weekend is running away from me, and it looks very unlikely that I will get round to putting a puzzle up on the site. 

There’s just time to note that my regular Friday appearance in The Independent on 28 April moved to today, and a similar shift will occur in three weeks’ time (in case I forget to mention it next time round…).  Beyond the (generally) usual Friday slots in The Independent, there’s a puzzle from me in The Times on 2 May, and a Times Jumbo on 13 May. There’ll be a blog on my recent Enigmatic Variations puzzle appearing during the forthcoming week (around 4 May, all being well).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The role of popular culture in crosswords is something of an obsession with me. There has been a lot of debate (particularly in America) about the need for crosswords to be relevant to all groups in the population, and that certain themes are excluding certain people from puzzles. There are the usual murmurs about puzzles being supplied by and for older white men, with the implication that they need to get more up-to-date, because the younger solvers certainly aren’t going to. Remind me again: which group is being accused of not adjusting to wider interests?

Christopher Fowler, the recently-deceased British writer (watch for an Independent Nina), once rather irritably wrote that if he found a word he didn’t know in a text he went and looked it up, rather than whining for the text to be made simpler. I’m certainly of a group that looks to find things out from puzzles, but the setters have to ensure that the answers are gettable. The complete cross-checking in American puzzles is a boon (until a crossing point requires knowledge of a retired soap star and a long-dead baseball player to fill that last cell), but there are traps for cryptic clue-writers. I recall a not-so-recent Independent puzzle where the answer was the name of a soccer player with which I was unfamiliar.  The clue used ‘doctor’ as part of its fodder, and I had the M cross-checked – but naturally the adjacent letter was unchecked. So was it MO, MB or MD? Each seemed equally implausible, and I could not decide. The gentleman in question was Kylian Mbappe, and I had no way of deciding. For a certain portion of the solvers, however, it was a write-in. (And I have come across him regularly since. No, I am not going to attempt giving him his diacritic; it will only come up as question-mark.)

That’s a sort of warning about the chances of success in trying to please a truly wide number of solvers. My own view of popular culture is that it is incredibly fragmented, but the components shout a lot so they appear more popular than they are. As a result, I tend to think in terms of Venn diagrams – your puzzle on Taylor Swift lyrics will pass over the heads of diehard rap fans, and vice versa, so some solvers will be unhappy either way. But there’ll be a coterie ensconced in the overlap of the circles that will be perfectly content.

This matters less in the more advanced puzzles. Daily puzzles should be solvable without much recourse to references (that requires the wordplay in clues to be precise), but barred puzzles seem to come with the expectation that research may be necessary. This has been inspired by an odd comment – or perhaps I should say a comment I found odd – on a recent Inquisitor by Ifor where one commenter wrote:

A good challenge but definitely less enjoyable than the pop culture ones.

One of Ifor’s predecessors had been one of my puzzles, which had garnered this comment:

 I do wonder, though, if the beleaguered solver expecting something more high-brow, such as is typically associated with Phi, or being inexplicably unfamiliar with today’s theme, may have struggled rather more.

My puzzle was based on Scooby-Doo, and the full names of the occupants of the Mystery Machine. Ifor used the bells of The Nine Tailors. When I solved his puzzle I saw TYTHO emerging, cried ‘Batty Thomas!’ and wrote in the others. But for me, Dorothy L Sayers is pop culture, something gleaned from Ian Carmichael as Wimsey on the telly, and only secondarily from the books. Scooby goes further back and is in my kids’ stuff mental file, and hence not popular any more (even if the franchise continues). So the comment on Ifor’s puzzle seems back-to-front to me.  But it does emphasise the rather personal nature of what is defined as popular culture, and also why someone is always going to grumble ‘that’s outside my GK’. (Here’s another example from 2007.)

So, here’s a round of puzzles for you to grumble about. For the first time ever, a set of bullet points:

• 18 April: Pangakupu in The Guardian
• 20 April: Kcit in The Telegraph Toughie
• 21 April: Phi in The Independent (perhaps this also needs a non-highbrow alert)
• 22 April: Inquisitor 1800, so PINK are back in harness
• 23 April: Kcit in the Enigmatic Variations slot in The Sunday Telegraph
• 28 April: Phi in The Independent 

Quite a run next week, possibly my busiest ever. Meanwhile (nearly forgot!) the puzzle new to the site this time round is an Independent daily from 2008.