The natural reading is why I wrote the clue I seldom return from any major city without describing its sandwiches at length and I was blinded by what was to me an eminently plausible image. It’s one where there is simply too much going on for the Everyman series, which has long been the go-to puzzle for beginners and lapsed or occasional solvers.Ģ1d Describing New York, talk up sandwiches I saw (6)Īs well as requiring an Ikea-style manual, none of the words “describing”, “talk up”, “sandwiches” and “saw” do what they appear to be doing in the natural reading of the sentence. I’ll confess an example in the hope that other setters might be emboldened to do the same. There are so many such terms.Īs a solver (one who seeks out the hardest puzzles but appreciates the easier ones), I most often run aground when trying to think of a synonym in order to decapitate it for the answer.Īs a setter, I’ve sometimes forgotten the Evans advice. A solver might successfully work out which parts of a clue offer the wordplay and the definition, but remain unhappily stuck when running through words for something abstract such as “time” which, when reversed, give a term of abuse for a stupid person. There are very few setters who haven’t found that a corner can only be filled if it includes either the name of a South Korean hamlet or an extinct species of spotted toad, and who, faced with having to unpick the grid-filling work, haven’t momentarily wondered whether solvers would be more likely to know the village or the toad. The setter can never un-see the answer, and there are many easy ways to be hard. The advice is hardest to follow when it comes to crosswords, especially cryptics. And in a quiz, the whole business should be about getting people to enjoy recalling information they already possess.
#Guardian crosswords cryptic driver
Something similar applies in a whodunnit: if, at the end, the reader is told that the murderer was a tram driver who made a brief comic cameo in chapter 3, he or she won’t be reading any more by that author. ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ must have been a most frightfully significant phrase to them, and they couldn’t reali se that it meant nothing at all to you.” You write down a clue and you think it’s too idiotically simple and that everyone will guess it straight off, and you’re frightfully surprised when they simply can’t get it in the least. “You know, I can’t see what on earth there can be in that to put the wind up anybody.” “‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’” Bobby repeated the phrase thoughtfully. It’s my favourite piece of Christie dialogue, one I think about most weekdays and one that should be stapled above the desk of every crossword setter and quiz writer.
#Guardian crosswords cryptic series
But one mystery remains unsolved – namely, why the series omits an exchange from the book, unless I missed it while my TV was buffering. Specifically, it’s hard to take issue with Hugh Laurie’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?.
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