Treasure Island came to me originally because I was thinking of a puzzle involving some hidden treasure, something along the lines of Merlin’s Olde Treasure Hunt (Listener 3883), though I didn’t think I could close to matching Merlin’s skill. The thought of the novel brought to mind “Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of rum” and that started me on a route to a grid. I decided at the outset that LONG JOHN SILVER would be an unclued entry (determining the grid size) , and that the theme would be indicated through a message including the third line of the song fragment and the book title (determining the number of clues). Then I thought of how best to represent the familiar opening words from the song in the grid. My initial idea was to represent the bottle of rum as RUM contained in some sort of bottle in the shape of a bottle.  FIFTEEN MEN ON THE DEAD MAN’S CHEST could be represented in various ways,  partly cryptic. I spent hours trying to construct a grid but found it impossible to produce something satisfactory without resorting to jumbled down entries. I came up with two tentative ones below:

Grid 1 – RUM in A  METHUSELAH

Grid 2 – RUM x 2 in JAMAICAN

6 down is a jumble of  RUM SHOP

I wasn’t altogether happy with the jumbled downs, since there was no thematic justification for them.

I decided to call the puzzle Derelict (after the poem by Young E. Alison) and set about writing clues. I happened to say to a friend, who is not a crossword solver but who shows a lot of interest in my puzzles, that I was planning one based on Treasure Island, and he immediately replied, “I bet you’re calling it Derelict.” This made me realise that it was a risky title if solvers were as knowledgeable as my friend, so I ditched it as a title but decided to exploit it as a thematic element . The obvious approach was for the word to be formed from discards from clashing answers, but, to be fair to solvers, I wanted the resolution of clashes to result in real words. This was an extra constraint, but it wasn’t hard to achieve. Shortly after that I decided that RUM could be an anagram indicator and was rather delighted to note that BOTTLE OF could convert to LEFT BOOT. This in turn led to the decision to have the rest of the couplet snaking through the grid, preferably in the shape of an island.

Initially I was not over-bothered about ambiguities in the trail since I was intending to ask only for the highlighting of the cryptic representation of the last three words, and I constructed a grid that actually had only 2 or 3 choices en route. Then I decided that I’d like solvers to outline the trail, which might look like part of an island. This is where things became very difficult, especially in the YO HO HO area. At one point I almost gave up, but a minor change to the barring enabled me to produce a grid where the trail was unambiguous. I couldn’t avoid a loop in the NE corner of the grid; this was a minor flaw, since it spoiled the impression of an island’s outline.

After some minor clue revisions following comments from two test-solvers I submitted the puzzle to the Listener editors. The first editor’s initial concern was that it was difficult to find a source other than the internet for the Alison poem, and this is not in accordance with The Listener team’s policy that thematic material should be verifiable without recourse to the internet.  Living abroad, I was not in a position to hunt  for a source in a library, and the only text I could track down on-line was an American anthology of poems, unlikely to be readily available in English libraries. One solution would be to ditch the Derelict element altogether, and therefore the clashes, but I was reluctant for it to go (as was one of my test solvers). It then occurred to me that DERELICT rather aptly described the discarded letters before they had been put to use again, so this might reassure solvers unable to trace the poem  in their choice of word to write below the grid. Solvers realising that the most likely choices to be left in the grid were those that made real words, would be faced with  [(GC)RETEIDL]*, from which DERELICT is the only possibility. A second concern was the overall length of the puzzle, which exceeded the maximum word count, so I undertook to re-write some clues.

The second editor, Derek Arthur, was also concerned about the difficulty of finding a text containing  the poem. An agreed solution was to make the writing of DERELICT under the grid optional. Derek also noted an ambiguity in the highlighting requirement. It was an ambiguity that I was originally aware of but which I dismissed because I’d intended ‘transmutation’ in the preamble to imply the formation of another object. He pointed out something that I had not noticed, that the alternative highlighting formed a capital I, which, as an abbreviation for iodine, might be linked with ‘transmutation’. I felt that it could have also tempted many solvers as it’s the abbreviation for ‘island’.

Alternative highlighting

My thanks to Derek for noticing something that had escaped me and others. My final preamble amendment, referring to something of little use to 1 down, resolved this ambiguity, and underlined the thematic point of the jumble.

Some solvers might have found the preamble a bit wordy, the result of  the several additions and amendments between submission and publication.

I should also record my thanks to two test solvers, who offered much-appreciated encouragement and advice. They may wish to remain anonymous, so I won’t reveal identities.