The Crossword Century Page 10

  Construction is regarded by solvers as a kind of authorship, and our relationship with an author is dependent on his or her being a person, too. The editors of the London Daily Telegraph discovered this in 1998 when they initiated a scheme to automate crossword production. Humans would still be paid to write clues, but at that point they would enter a database from which each day’s puzzle could be assembled.

  The ostensible reason was to reduce the frequency with which some words appeared as answers, although there was also an undeniable financial incentive. A core of the constructors refused to play ball and became known as the “Telegraph Six.” Ruth Crisp (Crispa) gave her withering assessment of the wheeze: “I don’t think a crossword done on a computer can possibly compare with one done individually. I have been compiling crosswords for half a century and I think my judgment can be depended on.”

  The invisible symmetries of human arrangement could not be replicated by machine, she insisted, and Roger Squires (Rufus) predicted that the tone of the resulting puzzles would be “like combining the musical styles of Beethoven and Mozart in the same musical movement.” This was all the more telling coming from the constructors for a newspaper that leaves each of its puzzles anonymous.

  The paper’s deputy editor, Boris Johnson—who has since become the mayor of London—was forced to agree. “In spite of the advantages the computer possesses, the machine has been condemned for a fatal lack of soul,” he announced. “The crossword will remain a duel of wits between the individual composer and the solver.” Squires responded with a single tart clue—“Submit to pressure and return to base (9)”—and returned to business. The answer? CLIMBDOWN.

  (It should be granted, though, that the home of the world’s first programmable electronic digital machine was a place rammed with super-solvers . . .)

  WHAT DUMB SPIES SEEK?

  INTELLIGENCE

  When puzzling meets espionage

  In March 2013, the National Security Agency released back issues of its in-house magazine, Cryptolog. Like every decent publication, Cryptolog found space for a crossword, though, being the NSA, it featured a puzzle of the cryptic variety loved by Sondheim. “Telephoned Reagan, we hear, to make pot (8),” for example, is a slightly scurrilous soundalike clue for CAULDRON, and “Traitors see danger all around! (9)” goes, via an anagram, to RENEGADES.

  The idea of signals intelligence officers enjoying a stiff puzzling challenge should surprise nobody. Take Meredith Gardner, who, in his retirement, solved the cryptic in the London Times every day. In his working life, too, he had a talent for finding a word or phrase hidden in a mass of surrounding text—handy for a US Army code breaker deciphering messages from a KGB clerk who was thought to be receiving information about the American nuclear program during the Cold War.

  A KGB codebook, abandoned in Finland and partially burned, helped him decipher Soviet intelligence reports, and when, in 1946, one contained the name of the leading scientists in the Western project to develop an atomic bomb, the hunt was on for informants at the Los Alamos weapons lab. Gardner deduced that there was a spy among the staff whose wife had a name that was encoded as three characters. These three characters, decrypted, were E—L. He twigged that the missing letter might not actually be a letter but a word that had been assigned its own character because it was frequently used in English. And one of the most frequently used words in English—well, it’s been used seven times already in this paragraph, so that would do it: “the.”

  And so in 1951 began the controversial trial for espionage of Julius Rosenberg and his wife, E-THE-L. Their subsequent execution attracted international concern, especially because it was not clear to what extent Ethel had really been involved, and America was charged by its liberal critics with nuclear hysteria. Gardner regretted Ethel’s death in the electric chair; Jean-Paul Sartre went further, describing it as “a legal lynching.” Gardner retired in 1972; after his death, his widow said that her husband’s take was that “those people at least believed in what they were doing”: not an endorsement of the Rosenbergs but not entirely supportive of their fate, either. Putting aside the ethics of geopolitics, one lesson is clear: Don’t work in the world of spying if your name can be rendered as a cryptic clue, and especially if it contains any of the most common English words. Andys, Theos, and Willys—your number’s up.

  Crosswords and modern Western intelligence agencies came onto the scene in the years just before the First World War; in the Second World War puzzles and spycraft cemented their relationship.

  Two years into the Second World War the national British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an unusual letter from a Mr. W. A. J. Gavin, purportedly writing as the chairman of the “Eccentrics Club.” A sum of money had been enclosed with the original letter, and the following challenge was issued, with a promise to send the money to a charity if certain conditions were met:

  If [one of your readers] succeeds in [solving the puzzle] you are authorized to send the enclosed £100 Bank of England note to the Eccentric Club Minesweepers’ Fund.

  My challenge, which allows 12 minutes for a solution, extends to all of your correspondents who claim to do your puzzles in such incredibly short periods of time.

  The editor invited any solvers to come to The Telegraph’s Fleet Street offices on a Saturday afternoon. Twelve minutes was an ask, but not impossible—and “Mr. Gavin” never thought it was. The puzzle was solved, the banknote dispatched to the Minesweepers’ Fund, and a few weeks later twenty-five of the successful solvers who had turned up on that Saturday afternoon received letters asking them to report to one Colonel Nichols of military intelligence, “who would very much like to see you on a matter of national importance.” One of them, Stanley Sedgewick, related what happened when he turned up:

  I was told, though not so primitively, that chaps with twisted brains like mine might be suitable for a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort. Thus it was that I reported to “the Spy School” at 1, Albany Road, Bedford.

  The “particular type of work” was code breaking at the new decryption center in Bletchley Park—code breaking that has been judged to have shortened the war “by not less than two years and probably by four years.”

  And while you would now expect code breaking recruitment to target experts in computing, there was then no programmable electronic digital machine for anyone with that kind of mind to work on. Not, that is, until Bletchley developed just such a device: the Colossus, a looming, loom-size behemoth that was devoted to cryptanalysis of high-level German army communications. Yet, powerful though it was, the human brain was invaluable in peering at encoded messages and spotting the most likely substitutions of words and letter pairs that could wring some sense back into them.

  An effective human decrypter had a certain temperament, characterized by meticulousness, the ability to balance ambiguities until they resolved themselves, patience—and a cool head. An unnamed code cracker remembered the necessity of not buckling under pressure:

  Just imagine the codework in front of you is a crossword. If you had someone breathing down your neck saying, “You’ve got to get it done in five minutes,” it wouldn’t help at all.

  The confluence of crosswords, computers, and cryptography makes for a good argument if you ever need to defend the hours you devote to puzzles. “Sure, it may seem like an abstract waste of time,” you can say, “but if it was the 1940s, I’d actually be training myself to help prevent the jackboot of Nazi oppression from enslaving all of Europe. Could you just excuse me a moment while I work on this tricky 13 down? Oh, and by the way, do you know what the secret German plan to negotiate a surrender in northern Italy was called?” By the time the other person has looked up that code name and discovered it was Kreuzworträtsel—Operation Crossword—and how arbitrary the name was, you’ll have won the argument, or at least had enough uninterrupted time to crack that tricky 13 down.

  As w
ell as playing their part in code breaking heroism, however, crosswords have also been suspected of having been used in the service of treason.

  The British intelligence service MI5 had its suspicions when, on August 17, 1942, the word DIEPPE appeared as an answer in the Telegraph puzzle and two days later there was a calamitous raid on the Channel port of that name. The intelligence officer Lord Tweedsmuir, son of spy novelist John Buchan, conducted “an immediate and exhaustive inquiry” and concluded that “it was just a remarkable coincidence—a complete fluke.”

  A one-off could be overlooked, even in a context as close to 1940s military intelligence as the crossword. But not an eight-off.

  On May 22, 1944, another Telegraph puzzle by the same constructor contained the clue “Red Indian on the Missouri,” which yielded the answer OMAHA. The Nebraskan city was not to be subject to an Allied raid, but “Omaha” was the secret code name for the beach in Normandy where US troops were to land in a fortnight’s time. This would have seemed like just another fluke . . . if it weren’t for the fact that code names for other D-Day beaches—JUNO, GOLD, UTAH, and SWORD—had all appeared in the Telegraph puzzle in the previous months.

  In the week and a half following OMAHA, Telegraph puzzles included the clues “This bush is a center of nursery revolutions” (MULBERRY, the code name for the operation’s floating harbors), “Britannia and he hold to the same thing” (NEPTUNE, the naval-assault stage), and “— but some bigwig like this has stolen some of it at times” (OVERLORD, the name for D-Day itself).

  The constructor, Leonard Dawe, received a home visit from a pair of MI5 agents. Since a copy of the Overlord plan had recently blown out of a window of military HQ at Norfolk House, MI5 was at that point extremely sensitive to leaks. “They turned me inside out,” remembered Dawe, and made him burn the notebooks he used to work on clues, but they found no evidence that the crosswords were being used to convey information to the enemy.

  Dawe was a headmaster as well as a constructor, and in 1984 one of his former pupils, Ronald French, spoke to The Telegraph. French was fourteen during the D-Day landings and said that he and the other schoolboys used to help fill the empty grids and that Dawe would later clue the words they had chosen. Why, though, did that grid filling include secret military code words? Because, insisted French, the names of the operations were well known around the school: The pupils had overheard chatter among Canadian and American soldiers posted nearby and picked up on the odd exciting and mysterious word.

  Perhaps. The lives of agents—and suspected agents—are, in their ambiguities, more like clues than answers, and the schoolboy-chatter explanation is a little too neat and decidedly too cute. Sometime Telegraph crossword editor Val Gilbert suspects that someone will, when clearing out an attic, find something that yields more details. “I hope,” she wrote, “they will contact The Daily Telegraph when they do.”

  Whatever the truth, Dawe’s puzzles raised serious concerns. The War Office banned the appearance of crosswords in papers headed for the Dominions (Canada, Australia, and so on) to stem a possible security breach and, following the liberation of Paris, newspapers there were forbidden to publish crosswords. Nowadays, it is tempting to see this as an overreaction. How, after all, might Hermann Göring have used the information in The Telegraph’s grids? Perhaps this is best understood as a period detail, understandable paranoia among those whose every working moment was spent looking for esoteric meanings and arcane ambiguity. In the age of microtransmitters and advanced encryption algorithms, the crossword as tool of espionage now feels downright quaint.

  But consider Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad, the Cleveland anesthesiologist who was recruited in 2002 by the CIA as part of a plan to persuade her brother to defect from an important nuclear role in Iraq. To help her remember the details of her brief, the agency offered her a kit involving invisible ink and fast-burning paper. Too risky to carry when flying to Baghdad, Alhaddad thought.

  Instead, she memorized the specifics and then wrote mnemonics into the squares of the crossword puzzles that would seem perfectly innocent in her luggage. The mission was successful: Alhaddad met her brother and brought back news—or, rather, non-news—of the lack of an Iraqi nuclear program. While her journey may have ultimately failed to avert a war, it remains at least a testament to old-fashioned, crossword-based spycraft.

  (Of course, there is another type who spends his or her professional life in pursuit of clues. Just as popular in the twentieth century and even more identified with genre fiction—and boasting an even stronger affinity with the apparently humble puzzle . . .)

  A DETECTIVE WITH STICKY FEET?

  GUMSHOE

  Crosswords and the detective novel

  “It’s all clues, isn’t it? Crosswords are far more exotic and exciting than police work. Most murders don’t require solving because they haven’t been planned.”

  —INSPECTOR MORSE

  The crossword took off at the same time as the whodunit and the jigsaw. It’s tempting to explain the appeal of all three puzzles by some primeval urge to solve, but that type of explanation raises more questions than it answers—which may be the sign of a good puzzle but is also indicative of a bad piece of analysis. Attributing action to a “need” does no more than restate its existence.

  Certainly, there’s an overlap between these forms of puzzle. Georges Perec constructed crosswords for Le Point newspaper and frames his experimental novel La Vie mode d’emploi using jigsaws; the pioneering cryptic constructor Torquemada, also a critic, reviewed 1,200 detective novels over four years; and Edgar Allan Poe, the godfather of the mystery story, concealed such elaborate messages in his poetry that some verses are practically double acrostics.

  For some commentators, what all these forms of puzzle have in common is that they are a waste of time. In his epic English History 1914–1945, the historian A. J. P. Taylor finds a little value in detective fiction for providing “accurate social detail” for the historian of the period, then dismisses the genre as “[otherwise] without significance: an intellectual game like the crosswords, which became a universal feature in the newspapers at this time.” His counterpart A. N. Wilson goes further in his book The Victorians:

  The cryptic crossword and the whodunit mystery story were two distinctive products of their time, expressions no doubt of the belief that if one could only worry at a problem for long enough it would have a single simple solution: Keynesian or Marxist economic theory, Roman Catholic, communist or fascist doctrine.

  The connection sounds neat enough, but it doesn’t stand up. A decent crossword is the very opposite of simplistic: Its whole appeal is based on the ambiguity of language and on the solver’s skepticism about what is going on. Likewise, not all detective yarns provide the simple solutions that Wilson discerns, as can testify anyone who has tried to puzzle out who killed the chauffeur Owen Taylor in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—including Chandler himself, who was asked that question by the team adapting his novel for the screen and had to admit ignorance.

  Stephen Sondheim—unofficial US ambassador for the cryptic and himself the creator of stage whodunit Getting Away with Murder and coauthor of the ludic murder-mystery movie The Last of Sheila—saw a similar affinity, but thought this was something to be celebrated.

  “A good clue,” he insisted, “can give you all the pleasures of being duped that a mystery story can.” Among those pleasures are apparent innocence, surprise, and the catharsis of exposing what has really been going on. Sondheim proved his point when he constructed a puzzle titled “Murder Mystery” in which the clues took the form of missing words in a miniature narrative:

  “I suggest we step into the study, where the victim’s flight from the murderer began, to 40A(3) if his desk will 44A(5) us further clues.”

  The constructor as whodunit writer? Sure, why not? Both, if they wish to dodge charges of unfairness, must give all the necessary information such that the �
�solution” will make sense in retrospect. Both must avoid making this too obvious, and both are probably more prone to making it too arcane. Novice constructors have a tendency to write clues that make perfect sense to themselves but prove impenetrable to solvers.

  Agatha Christie seemed to be talking about her own craft in the novel Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? when she had Lady Frances Derwent muse on a clue to a murder given by another character. “It’s like making crossword puzzles,” she remarks. “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.”

  The affection has long been mutual, with mystery writers weaving fictional crossword puzzles into their plots for a century. In 1928, Dorothy L. Sayers’s nobleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey begins the story “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will” flouncing around in silk pajamas, his every step “a conscious act of enjoyment,” helping his butler with a clue.

  The plot concerns a young woman who has begun experimenting with socialism. Her late uncle had been of the firm conviction that a “woman who pretends to be serious is wasting her time and spoiling her appearance,” so he resolved to teach this young woman a lesson by favoring her in his will but obscuring the contents of the document in crossword form.