If you have any comments or queries about the crosswords, please email.
If you have any technical problems with our crossword service, please email. But just as in chess The outcome I guess Would result in a surfeit of mating.Ĭongratulations: to the winner of the March Genius puzzle (No 141 set by Vlad), Susan Leather, Shrewsbury For those who may not have seen her (unless it's his) brutal appraisal of my tentative business plan, here is what she wrote:Ī forum for crosswords and dating Is surely a point worth debating. However PedAunty put the kibosh on the idea at once. Last month I speculated on the possibility of developing the comment facility under the online Quick crossword into a money-spinner, by doubling it up as a niche computer dating agency. Since then 'proper' cryptic crosswords have appeared in other US publications, such as Atlantic Monthly. But, thanks to Google Books, which has scanned huge volumes of printed material, you can see most of the 42 puzzles via, searching then under New York Magazine. A selection of them was published in 1980 as Stephen Sondheim's Crossword Puzzles, but you will be lucky to find a second-hand copy and it will be pricey, if you do.
Sondheim set 42 puzzles in total for New York magazine. For those interested in these things, his approach to cryptic crosswords can be read here. He stopped only when writing the music and lyrics for the 1971 Broadway musical comedy, Company, took up too much of his time: Broadway's gain, crosswords' loss. So, for the first year of the independent New York magazine's existence, Sondheim regularly set a cryptic puzzle for it: every week at first, then every two weeks and finally every third week. He agreed on condition that he was allowed to set a crossword puzzle on the lines of the BBC's Listener puzzle, to which he had been introduced while working in London. Sondheim was invited to contribute to a 'games' section. After the daily New York Herald Tribune folded in 1966, its Sunday magazine, New York, was relaunched under new ownership as an independent publication, competing directly with the New Yorker. The Sondheim boost to cryptics in the US came in 1968.
A typical Lewis cryptic clue was: 'Little skipper? (6) for TRUANT. On the side, though, from 1947 to 2008 he also produced a weekly puzzle for The Nation, almost 3,000 in total over 61 years. After the war he went back to the US National Security Agency, where he continued to break foreign codes until his retirement in 1969. Towards the end of WWII he was seconded to the British code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park and, while there, became entranced by British cryptic crosswords. In 1939 Lewis joined a team working to break Japanese naval codes. It was set by Frank Lewis, born at Salt Lake City in 1912, the son of an English immigrant farmer. But it is not true that the United States remained an entirely 'cryptic free' zone and Stephen Sondheim can take a great deal of the credit for bringing the delights of the 'British' cryptic clue to the attention of a small but significant American audience.Ī weekly crossword puzzle with cryptic clues was published from 1947 onwards in the radical/liberal magazine, The Nation. It is also said, correctly, that the development of the cryptic crossword as we know it today was a British (and specifically an English) achievement, dating essentially from the end of the Second World War. The publication by Simon and Schuster in 1924 of the first book of crosswords set those two tyro publishers off on the road to fame and fortune and triggered overnight a coast-to-coast crossword mania, which did not really spread to this side of the Atlantic until more than a decade later. It is said, correctly, that the modern crossword was an American creation.
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