MR James timed his to boiling an egg, Bill Clinton did his on Air Force One and they make John Humphrys cross. On the 100th anniversary of the crossword, Alan Connor argues that cryptics are easier than quicks
Earlier this year, John Humphrys gasped an incredulous "No!" at the idea that cryptic crosswords are easier than those we call quicks. John Henderson, known as Enigmatist to the Guardian solvers he has been teasing since 1979, told the Today presenter that he had spent three times as long on that morning's quick than he had on the full-fat cryptic. Humphrys was flabbergasted – and not a little defensive. The counterintuitive claim confirmed his fear that there are those whose brains are suited to cryptic wordplay – and that he will never be among them.
His suspicion is understandable. The cryptic solver is often depicted as having otherworldly intelligence – Inspector Morse finding inspiration for a murder case from a tricky acrostic, or George Smiley's MI5 colleague Connie Sachs filling in the Times's puzzle with an ink pen. In real life, the cryptic fan is more like the beleaguered commuter struggling with a clue in Madness's single Cardiac Arrest– an everyman who can't quite face the "news" part of the newspaper. Still, the sceptic wonders: those freakish sentences – "Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating", say – surely the cryptic is inherently more baffling, more time-consuming, more arduous than its quick counterpart?
I counter, straight-faced, that cryptics are at least twice as easy as quicks. Here's why: quicks give you only one route to each answer. With a clue such as "Flat (4)", your mind throws up all manner of four-letter words: WEAK, DULL, even DEAD. You can't know which the setter has in mind until you start filling other entries, all subject to the same uncertainty, until the entire grid of 169 squares starts to resemble a series of possibilities, each relying on the others.
In a cryptic, you are effectively given two clues in one. So when the Guardian setter Rufus offers "Quits flat (4)", you know you're looking for a word that in one context can mean "quits" and in another "flat". So you can call it quits and write EVEN into the grid with confidence. This is what crossword setters call a double definition.
Now, "Quits flat" is a plausible piece of language – it has what's known as a pleasing surface reading – but it's not quite the apparent gobbledygook that risks putting off newcomers: the sort that was parodied in the One Foot in the Grave episode that sees Victor Meldrew confront clues including "Mad poet mugged by banjo player sees red when eating pickles" before tutting to himself: "I don't seem to be able to do the crossword today as I appear to be temporarily out of mind-bending drugs."
More often, a clue gives only one definition of the answer – to be found at either the beginning or the end – along with a little recipe for obtaining the same letters. So in Guardian setter Gordius's"Holding device for turning leaves (5)", the definition is at the beginning: a holding device. The rest is an instruction that you should turn a word for "leaves" – that is, you should spell PARTS backwards and likewise end up with STRAP.
This is the point at which the would-be solver stares forlornly at the old hand and asks: "How am I expected to know all this is going on?" To which the answer is: you're not, not yet. It takes a while to get used to these tricks.
You also have to ignore the surface reading, since even the definition here is not straightforward. The most natural way to read "Holding device for turning leaves" is to take "holding" as a verb, doing the same job as it does in "holding out for a hero". But to get to STRAP, you need to re-read it as an adjective, like in "holding pattern". A trick, but a fair one – fairness is paramount among the crossword-setter's virtues. The setter tries to bend language as far as possible while still giving the solver a decent chance. So in crosswords, "wicked things" may be things with wicks – CANDLES, to you and me. And when the late Rover wrote of a "number of people in a theatre", he was asking for someone who does the numbing in an untheatrical kind of theatre – an ANAESTHETIST.
Enjoying being misled in this way is the lot of the solver. The cryptic form is peculiar to English language, which is composed of words from so many other languages that there are often multiple ways of saying the same thing, as well as manifold meanings of a given phrase. It is no surprise to learn that the two people most responsible for the cryptic's current state and status were a poet and translator (Edward Powys Mathers) and a writer (Adrian Bell). Each sought to develop the crossword beyond a series of definitional clues, the form in which it was created to fill some space in the Christmas edition of a New York newspaper 100 years ago – in 1913.
Mathers saw other ways to elicit an answer from a solver, using knock-knock jokes and rhyming couplets, and inventing the idea that the clue might give you a sense of the letters in an answer as well as its meaning. Bell's job was to make the crossword respectable. His employer, the Times, had responded with moralistic horror to the arrival in Britain of an American pastime that threatened to keep the working man from his labours. Already in America, an editorial warned, the crossword had "grown from the pastime of a few ingenious idlers into a national institution: a menace because it is making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society".
However, it was also an excellent way of selling newspapers – in particular, copies of the Daily Telegraph, which had a rather good crossword. So Bell was commissioned, for three guineas a puzzle, to compose clues that would reward those who had attended the right schools and universities. Indeed, early cryptics were not wholly cryptic – the solver needed to be able to fill the blanks in quotations from Keats one day and the Odes of Horace the next.
Bell pulled it off. The crossword became an emblem of respectability, with the effect that potential solvers still have the idea that there is no point in approaching a cryptic without a double-first from Magdalen, Magdalene or both. But the puzzle has changed. Gordius started setting for the Guardian when he entered a Christmas competition in 1966. He won, but was warned that "booze" was unacceptable. Nowadays cryptics are home to drug terminology, popular culture and ribald humour.
More importantly, you don't need a classical education to move letters around. Most of the time, all the information you need is right there in the clue. Sometimes, the answer itself is there. When Puck says "One lewdly desiring some bicycle chains (4)", the definition is "one lewdly desiring" and the wordplay can be taken quite literally: the solver extracts some of "bicycle chains" for the answer, LECH. In the same way, Paul's "Suspect confined by himself is hysterical (5)" gives FISHY.
"Some …", "… confined by …": both legitimate ways of indicating that the answer is under the solver's nose. The solver's task is to recognise when these devices are being used, while the setter's is to find a phrase that does the job without drawing attention to itself and making the solve too easy.
The nervous but curious should remember that the setter aims to lose gracefully. No setter likes to imagine the solver completely dumbfounded. Another pioneer of cryptics, the prebendary AF Ritchie, summarised matters in what setters refer to as "Afrit's Injunction", after his nom de guerre: "You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean."
So in this clue – "President taking circuitous line in consultation with me, I'm stretched out, tired and exhausted (7,11,9)"– the ever-devious Paul does not mean what he appears to be saying; the answer has nothing to do with an adviser – or an intern – who has spent too long in the Oval office. The answer is the name of a president followed by an anagram ("circuitous") of "line in consultation" and "me". And while the definition is elusive, nobody can argue, once they've got it, that a LINCOLN CONTINENTAL LIMOUSINE is not stretched out, tired nor exhausted.
The pleasure of a clue like this is two-fold: the satisfaction of finding the answer and the penny-dropping moment of realising quite why the answer is correct. Little wonder that few who get used to the circuitousness of cryptic constructors go back to quicks. Auden couldn't bear it when he moved to America and discovered that it was much harder to find a puzzle based on more than definitional clues. The New York Times, he complained, "frequently drives me up the wall with rage". British crosswords, he insisted, "may be more complicated, but they are always fair".
Stephen Sondheim agreed. In 1968, he tried to convince his fellow Americans of the delights of cryptics in an article titled "How to Do a Real Crossword Puzzle. Or What's a Four-letter Word for 'East Indian Betel Nut' and Who Cares?"
Not everyone agreed, I grant you. PG Wodehouse became upset on reading that MR James timed the boiling of his breakfast egg by doing the Times crossword, made worse by the information that James did not enjoy a hard-boiled egg. He wrote to the paper: "To a man who has been beating his head against the wall for twenty minutes over a single anagram it is g. and wormwood to read a statement like that one about the Provost of Eton and the eggs" and begged for the reinstatement of clues for EMU, a word that appeared in print far more often in the age of the crossword, incidentally, owing to the relative scarcity of three-letter words which end with a U.
For the rest of us, though, the crossword is often the only part of the paper we look at. We turn to the inside-back to see who the setter is to work out how stiff the day's challenge will be, and we solve on in the hope that today's puzzle will have one of those elusive clues where wordplay and definition are not isolated but work together, simultaneously. This happens in Pasquale's clue "What can define this? 'Stored kit' can, possibly (5-2-5)", where the whole clue, as well as the anagram, lead us to STOCK-IN-TRADE. Likewise, the same setter's beautifully terse "Minister admitting relationship (9)", where the letters KIN are admitted to PARSON for the dishonourable Cecil PARKINSON.
Which leads us scurrilously back to "… chaste Lord Archer vegetating". This was written by Araucaria for a puzzle published in 2001. It is the favourite cryptic clue of many Guardian readers – can you imagine anyone having a favourite quick-crossword clue or a favourite sudoku row?
Araucaria is a 92-year-old retired churchman who has been setting for the Guardian since 1958. He has a witty, erudite style and demonstrated his gently unconventional approach earlier this year in a puzzle headed "Araucaria has 18 down of the 19", in which 18 down turned out to be CANCER and 19 across OESOPHAGUS. Wondering what exciting news Araucaria had to impart – a CBE to accompany his O, perhaps – I glanced immediately at 18 down ("Sign of growth (6)") and worked through the six-letter signs of the zodiac until the light dawned and my stomach lurched. It was unique among Araucaria puzzles for not being in the least fun, though you had to take your hat off to the chutzpah on display.
More typical of his style is the Lord Archer clue. When it appeared, the one-time Conservative deputy chair had been infuriating Guardian readers for decades: the contrast between his party's 1990s moralistic Back to Basics campaign and suspicions about the wholesomeness of Archer's private life were only part of it. There was also the string of blockbusters that had sold so unstintingly that Archer was able, in 1979, to buy the former home of Rupert Brooke. "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" is the title of Brooke's poem, which ends "Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?", and so the building itself became for many a shorthand for a nostalgic love of a more decent England. The idea of Archer sitting in it, telling stories of various kinds, was not one cherished by your archetypal Guardian reader. And just when his rise seemed unstoppable, just after he had been selected as the Conservative candidate for the inaugural London mayoral election, Archer was charged with having fabricated evidence during the 1987 libel trial that had seen him awarded £500,000 damages from the Daily Star for a story about him and the prostitute Monica Coghlan. He was expelled from the party and left to contemplate his crimes at home.
Meanwhile, across Cambridgeshire in Somersham, Araucaria was composing a puzzle using the Scrabble tiles, which he prefers to any of the digital means of jumbling letters. As he often does, he was seeing if there was a decent clue for a long answer. He spotted that the letters that make up "Lord Archer" could contribute to an anagram of the phrase he had in mind. And when he spotted that "chaste" could do the same job, he realised that the combination of "chaste" and "Lord Archer" might make an arresting image. The remaining letters were TEVIGEGANT … And so Araucaria wrote the clue that described what had just happened: "Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)". The definition is "Poetical scene", the anagram indicator is the exquisitely pointed "surprisingly" and the rest is an anagram of THE OLD VICARAGE GRANTCHESTER. On 21 January 2001, the clue was published and Guardian solvers found four decades of pent-up spleen and indignation regarding Archer expressed with economical wit in an ingenious and memorable eight-word rebuke.
This is a clue to savour, to ogle and to marvel at. And my final piece of advice to cryptic newcomers is: take your time. Refuse to be intimidated – as Humphrys further was in that same Today item – by tales of extraordinarily speedy solves. Crossword setters spend hours honing and refining their clues, and much of the pleasure of decrypting them is lost if you rush. Puzzles are a satisfying, rewarding way of wasting time – so waste as much of it as you like.
• Alan Connor's book, Two Girls, One on Each Knee (7), is published this week by Penguin.