CHAPTER ELEVEN INTO THE CRYPT I CREEP Cryptic Puzzles You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean. —Alistair Ferguson Ritchie (Afrit of The Listener) While the mentally edentulous still have their pabulum, the cerebrally dentiferous can now demand a choice of daily bread into which they can really get their teeth. —Edward Powys Mathers (Torquemada of the Observer) You have to be a lunatic with a distorted mind to do it. —Derrick Somerset Macnutt (Ximenes of the Observer) ‘The subject of the above observations is the cryptic cross- word puzzle, sometimes referred to as “British-style.” The observers (two of whom in fact worked for the British newspaper the Observer) were constructors, of “setters” as the English call them, of the fiendishly difficult puzzles that baffle many Americans and delight their British cousins. ‘The reason for the bafflement and the delight is the same: that the chies to the answers in cryptic puzzles are not straightforward definitions, as literal-minded Americans are accustomed to, but purposely misleading puns, anagrams, and other tricky verbal devices, which the clever Brits lap up like treacle pudding.Into the Crypt I Creep York, all of them, you notice, in the effete, elite East—have featured them at one time or another. ‘Two adept American practitioners of the cryptic art are the Broadway lyricists Stephen Sondheim and Richard Maltby, Jr., who would readily agree, if asked, that the discipline of puzzle construc- tion is not unlike that of fitting words to the music of songs. Books of excruciatingly difficult puzzles by both Sondheim and Maltby are available wherever products for mental masochists are sold. Before you get started on the cryptics provided by your author, a primer may be in order for those of you not familiar with how the clues work. There are some rules. Almost always, the actual straightforward definition of the answer is stated somewhere in the clue, although it is usually accompanied by a secondary hint meant to confuse. The secondary hint may be a pun, an anagram, a homonym, or some even more outrageous verbal device. Some typical examples: ANAGRAMS Clue: “Real crazy king” Answer: LEAR. “Real” is an anagram of “Lear.” Note that when the clue is an anagram of aword or phrase whose letters are to be rearranged, there is usually some indication of that fact, in this case the word “crazy.” Other words signaling an anagram might be “clumsy,” “odd,” “confused,” “broken,” “disturbed,” “wild,” “mixed,” “demolished,” and so on. a CHARADES Clue: *Canonized trooper is an unknown person.” Answer: STRANGER. In the charade clue, the word is broken up into its component parts and each part is defined separately. In this case the “trooper” is a “ranger,” and he is “canonized” as indicated by the letters “St.” (for 177WORDS GONE WILD “saint”), yielding the definition of “an unknown person.” A more complicated charade clue might be: “Musical instruments put mother on edge by degrees.” Answer: MARIMBAS. Ma=mother, rim=edge, BAs=degrees. es TWO MEANINGS Clue: “Complain about seafood.” Answer: CRAB. The word “crab” has two meanings. Another cluc that has two words with double meanings: “Filming leading actor is meteoric phenom- enon.” Answer: SHOOTING STAR. ee REVERSALS Clue: “Snap back for bad reviews.” Answer: PANS. “Pans,” a theater term for unfavorable criticisms, is “snap” spelled backward. Indications of reversal are usually provided by such words as “back,” “backward,” “in reverse,” “wrong way,” or, in the case of vertical answers, “up,” “upward,” “ascending,” or “rising.” Another example of a reversal: “Dennis, undergoing setback, strayed.” Answer: SINNED. If the answer were in a vertical position in the grid, the clue might read: “On arising, Dennis strayed.” ee BEHEADINGS OR NO ENDINGS Clue: “Headless maid is a help.” Answer: AID. “Maid,” beheaded, that is losing its initial letter, becomes “aid” (“help”). An example of the loss of an ending might be the clue: “Take a deep breath of yearning, there’s no end in sight.” Answer: SIGH. Sometimes the missing letter or letters may come in the middle of the word, instead of the beginning or ending. Clue: “I 178Into the Crypt I Creep leave obvious map.” Answer: PLAIN. Remove “I” from “plain” (“obvious”) and the remaining letters are “plan,” meaning “map.” ee INSERTING OR ADDING LETTERS Clue: “Vm in California briefly for spy agency.” Answer: CIA. Instead of removing letters, the clue may invite you to add them. “California briefly” is the abbreviation “CA,” into which “I” is inserted to yield the answer. Clue: “Do put me on top of building.” Answer: DOME. —— HOMOPHONES Clue: “Animal can easily tire, I hear.” Answer: BOAR. “Boar” is a homophone of “bore.” Phrases like “I hear,” “it is said,” “reportedly,” or “sounds like” are usually indications of a homophone. ee HIDDEN LETTERS Clue: “Singer found in rotten orchard.” Answer: TENOR. The letters of “tenor” are found in “roten orchard.” Usually the words “in? “inside” “within,” “contain,” “embrace,” “swallow,” “surround,” or some other indication will precede or immediately follow the words in which the hidden letters are to be found. a 179WORDS GONE WILD CONTAINERS Clue: “Conveying Sir Rudolf’s acceptance of Wagnerian cycle.” Answer: BRINGING. Sir Rudolf refers to opera impresario Rudolf Bing, and the Wagne- rian cycle is the “Ring,” the letters of which are contained as follows: B-ring-ing. Just as with hidden letters, containers usually offer a clue that some letters are to be found within others; in this case it is the word “acceptance” that provides the hint. Other indicators might be “include,” “embrace,” “inside,” or “swallow.” ee INITIALS. The answer may be spelled out by the initial (or sometimes final) letters of words in the clue. Clue: “At first some types of rain may rage.” Answer: STORM. Indicated by the hint “at first,” the initial letters of “some types of rain may” spell the word STORM, which means “rage.” To use final letters, the clue might be “Finally, folks want to hear him rage,” producing STORM from the last letters of “folks want to hear him.” ee ABBREVIATIONS, SIGNS, AND SYMBOLS Some words may be used in the clue that appear in the answer as symbols or abbreviations. For example the word “love” in a clue may (or may not) refer to the tennis score of zero, which would indicate an “O” in the answer. Common abbreviations are often used: “right” and “left” may mean an “R” and an “L” in the answer. “Points,” as in points on the 180Into the Crypt I Creep compass could refer to the letters N, S, E, or W. The word “note” in a clue might refer to the letters in the musical scale. “Soft” might ” Numbers may refer to the letters in their Roman equivalents; “ten” might be indicate a “P” (the musical notation) and “loud” an “X” and “five” “V” in the answer. Every element of the clue must be carefully examined for this kind of symbolism. The answer ALB, for example, might be clued as “priest’s vestment is a pound or less.” An alb is vestment, and the letters “LB” are an abbreviation of “pound”; the phrase “or less” indicates that it is an abbreviation. ee PUNCTUATION Most internal punctuation marks such as periods and commas can be disregarded, since they are often used to misdirect you—but an exclamation point at the end of a clue may indicate something excep- tionally tricky in that clue requiring adroit mental detective work. Similarly, a question mark may suggest that the meaning of the clue as a whole should be considered, usually as an extended pun, without analyzing its individual components. eee More than one of these devices may be used in a single clue. Answers may be more than one word, and the number of letters in each word of the answer is given in parentheses following the clue. Punctuation and capitalization may be, and probably are, intended to mislead. Unlike Amcrican-style puzzles, there are unkeyed squares, that is, letters in some words do not cross with other words. Now, sink your teeth into these—and remember as Ximenes said, you have to be a lunatic with a distorted mind to do it. 181