Cluetopia (2013) by by David Astle
Good Reads meta-data is 303 pages, rated 3.87 by 47 litizens.
Genre: cruciverbal.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Strange and true.
Tagline: What hath Wynne wrought!
Wordsmith, quiz master, puzzleer, trivialista, all of that and more is this Astle cicerone as he leads the reader through a century of crossword lore, from the birth of the grid to the code words for the 1944 Normandy beaches with animated backstories, and some regrettable unpleasantness among the clues. Crosswords are life and life is crosswords with the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It all started with Arthur Wynne in 1913, and through the following century crosswords have evolved into the forms they take today, including the dreaded cryptics when the clue is clueless. What I suspected since my first and last try in the London Times long ago. A few tidbits follow.
A longtime setter at age 90 submitted his weekly cryptic with grid, clues and answers. Editor as usual worked the puzzle and found she could not see the connection between the cryptic clue for 14-Across and the answer. She asked colleagues and neither could anyone else. Sooo, she decided to telephone the setter for an explanation. Too late, he had died.
What is to be done with this puzzle. Deep six it? No, he was a long-time setter, with a following, who should have respectful send off. Run it then but how. Finally, she decided to run it with acknowledgement that no one at the office could explain the connection between the clue and the answer of 14-Across and offered a prize subscription to anyone who could. Many tried and failed, but to make matters worse, two different explanations combining clue and answer were offered that seemed coherent and cogent. Two prizes were given, and yet the mystery remains. Which was right, or was neither? Is there a third out there in an X-file? This is one example of the backstories that Astle has unearthed and set forth with panache.
Most are amusing, like the 8-storey apartment building in Lvov with one face painted as a crossword grid with clues, and at night when illuminated by street lights, the answers are visible on the grid to an onlooker from the sidewalk. Others include the alchemy of rendering crosswords with Chinese characters or Arab script. There are instances of setters using the crossword to propose marriage, announce births, and one instance where the setter foreshadowed his own forthcoming death. Then there are the specialist puzzles, for engineers, surgeons, and historians (using Latin or koine Greek for ancient historians), but none have used hieroglyphics. Yet.
Another memorable, though distasteful example, is finding who murdered schoolboy Lars in East Germany. A torn corner of a crossword led to the owner of the suitcase into which dead Lars had been stuffed and checked at a train station luggage office. The suitcase owner’s daughter had, unknown to Mom, lent the case to a very neurodivergent boyfriend. Bingo! To find mom who did the puzzle, the police collected and reviewed 32,000 handwriting specimens. From that 32,000 they eventually focussed on 300 that were possibilities. They then showed photos of the suitcase to each, and Mom said mine. Checked for her finger prints and yes, this was her case, which she thought was still in the attic. Yes, boyfriend did it and was duly incarcerated.
Lars’s family had no clout, and the hobbled media would not press the case in East Germany so the decision was made solely by the police to keep going. Would any McKinsey managed police force today devote a bottomless ocean of time, effort, and budget to one sex murder of an insignificant lad. I rather doubt it. A career-minded manager (is there any other kind?), eyes on the annual review and the KPI’s which always are about budget whatever the sugar coating, would stop that investigation at some expenditure determined by an algorithm. Moreover, by concentrating on easy cases the KPIs go up. Unless the media took the case up today, it would be filed and forgotten; that is my guess.
I found much to like in the book, and some trivia for my collection, and much human interest. The prose is sprightly; there are a hundred chapters, each is 2-5 pages long. Recommended to all cruciverbalist: wanna-be’s and has-beens.
However, the omnivore Astle omits the crossword that briefly appeared in Charlie Chan in Monte Carlo (1937). Note that for second edition.
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