I’d like to tell you about my favorite puzzle type, the variety cryptic crossword. There’s a good chance that if you’ve heard of it, it’s your favorite puzzle type too. If you haven’t, I’m gonna try to bring you over to my side of the fence.
Here’s why I’m doing this: Lone Shark just announced a new collection of my variety cryptics, called The 12 Days of Cryptics. Yes, I should have thought of that title a quarter century ago. But I did now! Since I can’t resist a stellar pun, you get a preview of my upcoming holiday-themed cryptic extravaganza, which you can sign up for on BackerKit right now.
OK, some of you are like, great, Mike, but what the heck are you jabbering on about? Here’s a little primer on the variety cryptic, with some visual examples showing why it’s the best puzzle type ever.
The crossword was, as you may know, invented in 1890 by Italy’s Giuseppe Airoldi, then improved upon by American Arthur Wynne in 1913, then brought in its current form to the New York Times by Margaret Farrar in 1942. Folks went nuts for the crossword in those days. There were crossword songs on the radio and a moral panic about the dangers of solving.
As with all things American, the Brits decided they could do it cooler. Setters with boss-sounding pseudonyms like Torquemada, Ximenes, and Castor and Pollux turned the crossword on its ear, introducing puns and anagrams and printer’s devilry to the form.
For each entry, a British crossword broke the clues into two halves: a definition half, which defined the answer in a standard way, and a cryptic half, which defined it in a wordplay form. For example, the cryptic clue “The waves thrashed canoe (5)” defined the five-letter word OCEAN as “the waves” but also as an anagram (clued by “thrashed,” or “mixed up”) of CANOE. Or “Sent back beer worthy of a prince (5)” was REGAL, defined as “worthy of a prince” but also as a reversal (“sent back”) of LAGER. And those were only two of the puzzle types you’d encounter. There’d be hidden words, deletions, homophones, and many other types of wordplay. You had to decode each clue to figure out what to enter in the grid.
A particularly mean type of British crossword was the “variety” crossword. Not only were all the words clued in this word way, but something strange would happen to some or all of them before or after entry. It’s possible that a bunch of words would gain a letter and become birds, with the extra letters forming a V-shape of flying geese. I didn’t make that up.
Here’s a particularly bizarre (or maybe just average) Listener puzzle from the setter Babs in 1950, lifted from the Crossword Unclued blog.
Pre-World War II, the Listener and Observer’s crosswords were as popular as the Times’s were here. And nobody in America could understand them one whit.
Well, except for one wit: Stephen Sondheim. Yes, that Sondheim. In the 1960s, the great composer brought the British crossword to our shores, doing some very clever things to standardize the form and make it a lot more palatable to Americans. Sondheim published dozens of these variety cryptic crosswords, often with musical themes. Here’s Sondheim casually knocking out a puzzle in the shape of a 12-sided die.
In doing so, he caught the attention of some rising stars in the puzzle scene. At Harper’s Bazaar, Sondheim’s friend and fellow Tony-winner Richard Maltby joined with E.R. Galli to introduce magazine readers to this new type of diversion. At the Atlantic, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon started making what are often called the greatest cryptics of all time. At a new publication called Games, Henry Hook, Mike Shenk, and Will Shortz started churning them out. And that’s when they caught me.
At age 15, I started writing crosswords and other puzzles for Games, notably trying my hand at cryptics. So did Trip Payne, Rebekah Kornbluh, David Ellis Dickerson, Patrick Berry, Fraser Simpson, Francis Heaney, Brendan Emmett Quigley, and Henri Picciotto, among other young punks. This new generation made the cryptic crossword do tricks it had not imagined it could. In the early 1990s, Stan Newman published us all in his magazine Tough Cryptics.
The National Puzzlers’ League became an incubator for the best cryptics of the day. Its magazine The Enigma featured mind-blowing designs from constructors like Joshua Kosman, Rick Rubenstein, Jeffrey Harris, and Rosalie Moskovitch. Its conventions became cryptic rabbit holes, with everyone looking forward to/bracing for Kevin Wald’s annual three-part brain-bender.
A new renaissance began in the 2000s. Will published regular cryptics in the Times. Fraser opened up the puzzle type in Canada’s Globe and Mail and in the New Yorker. Online cryptics exploded, with the Inkubator and AVXW giving a home to newer constructors like Stella Zawitowski, Neville Fogarty, and Will Nediger. And most notably, Roger Wolff started publishing books of variety cryptics, the Cryptic All-Stars series. The variety cryptic became a form that’s embraced all over the new world of puzzles. There are more of them available now than ever before.
For myself, I published my biggest runs of variety cryptics in Tough Cryptics and Games in the 1990s and early 2000s. Here’s one of mine from the 1990s, more recently republished in Games. Then, except for an occasional convention cryptic, I put them on pause. I had found other puzzle types that caught my attention, and focused on churning out more approachable books like The Maze of Games and Puzzlecraft.
And then I got a hankering. Patrick Berry made one a while back that reminded me how fun it was to make seemingly impossible variety cryptic grids. I decided to try making some again. But I needed a reason, a theme to pull it all together and keep my interest up.
That, of course, was a pun. The 12 Days of Cryptics is just a really good title. I needed a set of puzzles that could live up to that standard. So, I started in on a theme of a twelve-day holiday in which all sorts of things would happen to you as you solved the puzzles. Here’s the sampler puzzle at the front. You can download The 12 Days of Cryptics Sampler here.
We’re planning to run a cryptic puzzle series as an event, doling them out starting in December. We’ll be keeping tabs on our solvers during the hunt. It should be a fun Advent Calendar-like experience.
You can sign up for it by heading to the Lone Shark Puzzle Party, which launches next week. You can get the cryptic series, plus all our new books like The Hunting of the Shark and Mindspaces. Pretty much every puzzle we’ve ever made, actually. If you click “Yes, I like puzzles,” you’ll be notified when it goes live. If you like this sort of thing, I’d love it if you backed it right away.
If you’ve fallen in love with variety cryptics, I hope you’ll give my new puzzles a shot. If you’ve never tried this puzzle type, this could be a great introduction into a world of cryptic devotion. But any way you get there, I hope you find this puzzle type as fun as I do. Thanks for reading along.
Cryptically yours,
Mike