Alan Connor looks at how two puzzle-loving Italian cops made a breakthrough in the fight against 'Ndrangheta
What would you do if you were tasked with giving Inspector Morse a voguish reboot?
The vision of the hero who solves crosswords in his breaks from solving crimes – or vice versa – is compelling, the wordplay in one pursuit suggesting different ways of looking at the evidence in the other and the healthy inner life of the non-workaholic an endearing quirk.
To be sure, there were crossword-loving detectives before there was Morse: Lord Peter Wimsey, say, not to mention the panoply of golden-age detective novels in which setters and solvers left clues to murders in the form of clues and grids, from the 1920s' Crime of the Crossword through Parnell Hall's splendidly titled You Have The Right To Remain Puzzled and With This Puzzle, I Thee Kill to the very best: Herbert Resnicow's Murder Across and Down.
But say you wanted a more radical makeover? You might recall when an example of the code used by Elizabeth I to communicate with the servant of one of her suitors was displayed in the National Maritime Museum and how two sleuths – a spook and a crossword setter – raced to decrypt the billet doux. (The setter was not named but my money was on Ann Tait.)
It was the setter who won in this case, which might suggest a detective doing much the same thing during the actual Elizabethan era, when the stakes were higher: a kind of latter-day Cadfael meets Lord Melchett with a touch of the Umberto Ecos.
For our purposes, though, love is not much of a crime. For the highest stakes, perhaps our detective should be pitted against not Oxford dons or lovelorn monarchs, but the Italian mafia. Too far-fetched? Real life doesn't think so.
"'Ndrangheta" is not just a word which would prove very handy to crossword setters in need of a word beginning with three consonants. It's also the southern Italian mob regarded by the authorities as more dangerous and powerful than Cosa Nostra.
If that 'Ndrangheta, then, had a secretive initiation process – and if that oath-taking were done using a special mafioso alphabet – then the details of that process would be of great interest to the forces of law, not to mention order.
And so it was in Rome, where the police found, among a weapons cache, a handwritten initiation document – and were more than a little worried to see that the 'Ndrangheta tentacles had extended from the "toe" of Italy, halfway up the country. What to do, then, with the notepaper's baffling symbols and squiggles? Call in a couple of crossword-solving cops, of course. Or, as La Repubblica described them, "due colleghi appassionati di enigmistica":
Niente programmi software di lettura incrociata, niente consulenti d'alto livello, nessuna diavoleria tecnologica. Solo capatosta e un po' di buon senso. E alla fine ha funzionato, con lo schema delle parole incrociate senza definizioni.
The two poliziotti toiled over what resembled a mash-up of Cyrillic, Aramaic and Mandarin until deciding which bit represented the letter C, then "solved" the puzzle with that C as the basis. What paid off, apparently, was mule-headedness, common sense and treating the document as if it were a kind of "crossword with no clues".
And so the document yielded its curses and "I want blood and honour"s, simultaneously chilling and risibly self-regarding, and the police declared a break in the case - specifically a high-profile murder but also the the ongoing fight against 'Ndrangheta - an increasingly corporate outfit, despite its old-school version of a job application form.
Perhaps, then, our rebooted Morse needs a pair of solvers rather than a solitary decrypter. We all know that crosswords are better as a dual or group activity - so we have a buddy movie, I reckon. All we need is some dialogue. This is what I have so far:
– Sergeant, a word. What does a horse's head mean to you?
– Well, in a down clue, chief, probably an H.
– Now is not the time for your damn wordplay, Genio.
What else? Let's aim to get this greenlit for a 2016 release.