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You might know Ross from his website An Englishman Solves American Crosswords. And perhaps a handful of you know that he used to be the editor of the Listener Crossword in the Times of London. Anyway, Ross has been dutifully trying to get me to go cryptic. Just last summer he sent me an anthology of cryptics he'd edited. In it, Ross wrote:
To BEQ: The soup can to my Warhol My ACPT nemesis ... Now it's your turn to suffer!
Suffer I did. Those puzzles might as well have been in Esperanto. I stood no shot. Recall I only recently managed to get the Everyman puzzle in the Guardian. You know, the one designed for the drunk bricklayers/football hooligans. Times of London varieties are out of my ken.
Anyway, I'm glad to have this guest puzzle, this sort of half cryptic/half themed American puzzle. Fun stuff; now onto the interview.
BEQ: Tell me about your puzzlemaking background.Ross: I was a late developer when it comes to actually making puzzles. I didn't start till around 1992, when I was in my early thirties. Solving had been been a solitary activity for me and I was totally in awe of crossword "setters" (that's the British term).
It wasn't till I actually met some of these people socially that I plucked up the courage to implement the ideas I had. The internet now allows solvers and puzzlemakers to interact more easily, which is great.
BEQ: What nom de puzzles do you use?Ross: As you probably know, most British puzzles either have no byline or are published under a pseudonym. I started as Arcturus (the "bear ward", so an allusion to my surname) and have kept the star theme by appearing under Mira, Beetlejuice, Starman, etc. I've used Aldebaran (a double star) for puzzles created jointly with my wife Magdalen.
BEQ: What does a British cryptic editor do exactly? What's the puzzling process? How many clues are rewritten?
Ross: Yes, I was an editor for the Listener Crossword from 1994 to 2005. The Listener is a weekly variety cryptic series that's reputedly "the world's most difficult crossword." It has such a fanatical following that it outlived the BBC magazine it started in and now has a home in the London Times.The thematic aspects of a typical Listener Crossword are akin to the "meta" puzzles in Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest, but can get very complex and often affect cluing (e.g. cryptic clues might have a misprint in them you have to identify, or answers might be transformed in some way).
I became an editor after successfully solving the Listener series for 224 weeks in succession. A record that has since been beaten, but was exceptional in the pre-internet days, when you had to visit a bricks-and-mortar library (or bookstore!) to research anything you couldn't verify at home.
The Listener series actually has a team of two editors: one to liaise with the puzzlemakers and solve incoming puzzles for the first time; another to solve shortlisted puzzles for a second time and liaise with the publisher. I started out doing the first role and moved to the second in 2002.
Like many series in the USA, the Listener accepts submissions from all-comers purely on merit, and the level of editorial intervention depends a lot on the experience of the puzzlemaker. I would say about 20% of clues got revised in some way (much less than a typical American crossword ... rewriting cryptic clues is a heap of work!)
BEQ: What's some of the best cryptic clues you've ever seen?Ross: Clue writing competitions are a big part of the crossword scene in the UK and some of the best cryptic clues I've seen have been competition winners. Often these are of the "& lit." type, in which the complete clue can be read as both wordplay leading to the answer and (literally) a definition of the answer. & lits. are tough to write, but quite brilliant when you can make them read naturally.
Here are some favorite examples culled from the prizewinners for the Azed competition [with the answer and explanation in brackets afterwards]:
- You'll recollect letters to St Nick go here [STOCKING. Anag. of ST NICK GO, & lit.]
- Item gran arranged family slides in? [MAGIC LANTERN. CLAN in anag. of ITEM GRAN, & lit.]
- Wild love affair like this could give you coronary [CARRY-ON. Anag. incl. O, & lit.]
An interesting aspect of cryptic cluing is that you can have a great clue for a totally mundane answer. Answers like EPEE or IRATE would be strenuously avoided in an American grid, but could be brought to life in a cryptic if an exciting and original way to clue them is found.
BEQ: What made you take the plunge into solving American puzzles? What was the hardest thing to pick up?
Ross: I wouldn't have solved American puzzles if I hadn't emigrated here at the end of 2006. Like many Brits, I rather looked down on "definition only" puzzles and didn't realize how much fun modern US puzzles are and how challenging they can be.
After a couple of years dominated by the logistics of moving, weddings in the USA and the UK, applications for permanent residency etc, I started to solve the New York Times crossword regularly, particularly enjoying the Thursday thru Saturday ones.
At the same time, I could see that cryptic crosswords in the US occupy a very small (and seemingly shrinking) niche. But I'd in fact already cooled to the genre back in the UK, where I'd done everything one can do with cryptic crosswords and was getting rather tired of them.
So I relished taking up a new challenge. To bootstrap the learning process, I wrote daily commentaries on the New York Times crosswords during calendar years 2009 to 2010. I also started competing in the ACPT and have seen slow but steady progress up the rankings.
The biggest challenge for me is the encyclopedic knowledge you need to solve American puzzles. My knowledge of dictionary words is pretty good from cryptics; but the cultural references, particularly those specific to the US, are taking me a while to accumulate. I especially struggle with US history, geography, politics, TV shows, and (most of all) sports!
I also had to adjust to a lack of "enumerations": these indicators of multi-word or hyphenated answers are very handy when solving cryptics, but American crosswords don't have them. When I started out, I often confidently wrote S as the last letter with a clue like {Ushers to the exit} or ED as the ending with {Disgusted}. This made it much harder to recognize the answers as SEES OUT and FED UP! In a British cryptic, the equivalent clues would be helpfully tagged (4,3) and (3,2).
Brendan Emmett Quigley creates custom-made puzzles for all occasions: birthdays and bar mitzvahs, anniversaries and retirements. You name it. Need a puzzle for your website or your publication? He can do that, too.
Brendan's custom work clients have included The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, BeerAdvocate, Boston Magazine, De Beers, The Decemberists, ESPN, The Improper Bostonian, Lollapuzzoola, McSweeney's, Phish, Reflexive, The Smithsonian Magazine, St. Martin's Press, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, and Andrew Weil.
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