There are many books designed to help solvers new to crosswords but not another like this one. “A cryptic clue is not a sentence” it surprisingly begins. It is written by a solver evidently not himself a setter and seeming in awe of setters eg he describes the use of convertible as an anagram indicator as “remarkably clever” and “probably the product of sheer genius”. Having used that one myself, I must agree
The objective as set out in the introduction (written by a Mrs Pringle, not otherwise identified) is “to take the frustration out of crossword solving by providing a few basic techniques”. So absolutely nothing is assumed as prior knowledge eg 4 pages explain checked letters in grids (“if the answer to an across clue gives x… one must check the down clue to see if the clue contains an x”).
The author is rarely deflected from this task of basic explanations which he has thought about and cleverly codified in great depth. He is never tempted to criticise “unsound” clues (such as Sailors of the tsar = tars) or grids eg pointing out that " some grids are made up of four loosely linked sub-grids" but refraining from saying this is a weakness.
However, I am doubtful that the objective will be achieved for one reason - the author's own terminology. Albeit ingenious and original, I found it off-putting. There is a glossary stretching to 15 pages but I found I had to turn to this repeatedly. We are introduced to such as beheadments and disheartenments as well as the even more exotic creatures dix, undix, onalosi, olapsek, rek. There are numer (device exploiting verbal association of numbers), parabrebit ( device used … to paraphrase and abbreviate) and isolano ("word not admitting even a single letter change eg gnu, ova and urn"). This last points to the narrow but focused scope of the book in that only squared puzzles from a small number of crossword sources have been studied with no allowance for larger databases such as Chambers to disprove the above isolano with oba, oca, oda, ure etc)
Some of the new terms seem unnecessary eg a cryptic allusion clue is a nosek (“no clear synonymcrux, exposition and keyword”) and a definition is a synonymcrux.
Maybe future editions will benefit from tighter editing eg the term humer on page 40 is not explained until page 129 and there are 2 spelling errors on one page ie. reversable and portentious.
There are some nice clues used eg Dreamers who are thought heels for idealists and What made the girl lighter? for anagram
There are also some pleasant diversions (eg on Roman numerals) helping to break up a detailed diet of clue explanations.
So who might this book benefit? I'd say those of an academic bent wanting to start on say, The Sunday Times crossword but not for prospective Mephisto solvers. Most Club members would find the book once put down, a hard one to pick up again; but that's not to denigrate Mr Greef's highly innovative attempt to help cruciverbal rookies.
Review by Tim Moorey, a Mephisto setter for the Sunday Times Magazine.
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