It is an old saw in the newspaper business that while you can get almost anything wrong – the scorers in the cup final, the winner of the 4.10 at Haydock – and few readers will bat an eyelid, if you make a mistake in the crossword puzzle then you will be dealing with complaints for weeks. Crossword lovers are obsessive, and their howls of displeasure if you put in the wrong answer for seven across will be anything but cryptic.
By their followers, setters are regarded as something akin to folk heroes, even if they are only known to most by their aliases. When the great Guardian setter John Graham, universally known by his nom de plume Araucaria, announced in a series of clues in one of his puzzles that he had terminal cancer, it unleashed a flood of affection among readers. One said he had planted a monkey puzzle tree in honour of Mr Graham’s moniker. As a Cambridge-educated pillar of the establishment, Graham – a Church of England priest – fitted the usual mental image of a crossword devotee, or cruciverbalist. Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Morse, was another enthusiast and named his detective after a fellow competitive solver, the Lloyds Bank chairman Sir Jeremy Morse.
But this picture is deceptive: women are reckoned to be in the majority when it comes to getting a daily crossword fix. It is in setting and competitive solving that men dominate. The erroneous but pervasive typecasting may explain the excitement among cruciverbalists at a recent tweet by the Canadian singer-songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen. “Once upon a time I was the answer in the New York Times crossword puzzle,” she enthused. “A true career highlight. My father and I thought I had peaked.” She appended her own puzzle, plugging her latest album to her 9.3 million Twitter followers.
Though crosswords can trace their roots back to the middle of the 19th century, they really took off a century ago with a “word-cross” puzzle set by the English-born journalist Arthur Wynne in the Christmas 1913 issue of the New York World newspaper. Word-crosses morphed into crosswords, and within a few years every newspaper in the US had one, with the exception of the New York Times, which in 1924 described them as the “utterly futile finding of words”.
Five years later, it boldly declared: “The cross-word puzzle, it seems, has gone the way of all fads.” In 1942, it finally recognised its error and introduced one, at the prompting of Margaret Farrar, the person who did most to popularise them. She reckoned they would help take Americans’ minds off the war, and the New York Times crossword, which she edited for almost 30 years, became the US’s foremost puzzle.
The recent death of another crossword-loving Margaret – Margaret Irvine, who set crosswords for the Guardian as Nutmeg (and elsewhere as Mace) – was also commemorated through a crossword by her colleague, Arachne (real name: Sarah Hayes). 1 across: Incomparable lady enthralling all at last (8); 5 across: Evergreen head girl (6). In an earlier interview, Ms Hayes revealed the unexpected value of crosswords in exposing and challenging prejudice. The issue arose over a clue involving female drivers, the reaction to which appeared to suggest an astonishment that they existed. Since then, she said, she had made a particular effort to “use females in clues”. This is not just entertainment but political education.
