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Listener 4183, Continental Drift: A Setter’s Blog by Shark

Posted by Listen With Others on 21 April 2012

My debut Listener – how long have I waited to say that! Indeed this was almost a debut puzzle as it was the third one I set about four years ago. Although I can remember where I was when I set it (I won’t bore you!), the difficulty now is that I cannot remember why I thought of the puzzle. I don’t think it was based on a Listener puzzle using outlines of places, as I had only been solving for about a year, but I do remember thinking that the outline of Africa could be constructed using the letters of the word.

I got an outline of Africa and placed it over a large grid and worked out that it needed to be slightly longer than it was wide and therefore plumped for a 13×12 grid. But how to choose the letters? What if Africa was an odd-one-out. Continents – not enough. Countries – yes, although there are far too many. European countries were the way to go. I sat down with Chambers looking up all possibilties preceding another word, and listed them in length order. Highlighting every occurrence of A F R I and C in each, I could work out a possible symmetrical grid using every down entry. However I soon realized that if I were to use every down entry, I would never make the across entries into real words. There was no point in using only a few down entries, so I went for across jumbles. Luckily the grid could work this way ensuring symmetry. Solvers on the whole are not keen on jumbles, so I wanted to make the clues easier. I thought of cluing these with the wordplay producing the jumbled form. I had never seen this gimmick when I set it, but I have seen it since.

I sent the puzzle off to John Grimshaw in December 2008 and never heard any response until Shane came on board when he and Roger discovered several “lost” puzzles. Thankfully the editors decided they would re-solve them (not actually knowing if it had been solved in the first place).

Here comes the debate. Solvers on the whole have given positive feedback and so I am pleased it has gone down so well. However, several solvers noticed the connection very early on. I can assure you the comments would have been very different if you had solved the original format. The grid fill was not an issue with the editors, but the denouement proved too difficult with my initial preamble. This merely stated that the solver had to find an odd-one-out, without any extra pointers, which proved to be a stumbling block. I had to agree with the editors that the theme was enjoyable enough without the added difficulty and the extra leap would merit criticism. Talking of editors, I don’t think anything happened to Roger at the end of the Listener dinner (see 20 down) but has anyone seen him since?

Shark
 

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Continental Drift by Shark

Posted by shirleycurran on 20 April 2012

For the second week running we have a new Listener name, though Shark is familiar in the IQ, EV and Magpie series (one of those rare compilers who can set a numerical puzzle too) and well-known to us for the flawless cluing.

We set to work with more than a little trepidation, especially seeing that odious word ‘jumble’ in the deliciously short preamble. Originality is clearly what our editors are looking for in their new setters and we breathed a sigh of relief when we read more carefully (Remember Numpty rule no.1, ‘Read and reread the preamble’) ‘In across clues the wordplay refers to the grid entry, which is a jumble of the defined answer.’

Exactly what that meant quickly became clear as the most obvious clues yielded their secrets. ‘To be fed contents of fromage frais (4)’ FARE is ‘to be fed’ in BRB and there were the jumbled letters hiding in ‘fromagE FRAis. ‘Overcharge nursing home initially – it is to be spent in Korea (4)’. That had to be the old CHON, coming from OC + N(ursing) H(ome).

What about the lovely ‘Deer beginning to emerge over ridge (4)’ A fine surface reading with ELK + E(merge) ‘over’ or returning to give EKLE – a jumble of KEEL or ridge. There was a fine range of fields of knowledge touched on in these clues, with, of course, the usual Listener compiler’s touch of the hard stuff in ‘Cooks in fine wine – half left (5)’ F + RIES(ling), ‘Practically rush drink (3)’ TEA(r) and the inevitable result in ‘Urine container with unknown disease (3)’ PO + X.

A touch of humour there, but not half so racy as the delightful in-joke about our Editor, ‘Roger removed from annual dinner in style (3)’ WAYGOOSE less ‘goose’. All the letters of WAY were confirmed by intersecting ones but it was days after completion that I finally stopped worrying about whether Roger had just gone rather over the top after I last saw him in the bar at about 3 a.m. after the Listener annual dinner. How on earth did Shark find that obscure word for a printer’s annual dinner and spot the possibility for a hilarious (and rather scurrilous) clue?

We were thoroughly enjoying this solve as the grid speedily filled, and rather reluctant for it to end too quickly but we must have struck lucky, as the potential adjectives for our first half-dozen solutions established a pattern that was soon confirmed. (That is what I meant about the editors looking for originality – something new); those adjectives. We had FRENCH MUSTARD (yes, we know that ‘MUD’ can be gutters in Scotland), GREEK NOSE, ITALIAN SONNET, SPANISH FLY and RUSSIAN TEA. It was obvious that one adjective was going to stray outside Europe and it just could have been China or Mexican tea, but we held our breath and completed the down clues, and, sure enough, a far better candidate presented itself.

AFRICAN VIOLETS! The second pdm quickly followed. We had to highlight ‘all occurrences of letters in the nounal form of this “odd one out” in the grid’. At once a familiar shape appeared and we were struck with amazement at the skill of this compilation. Unobtrusively, Shark had managed to restrict the presence of those letters A F R I C A to the continent’s outline: he left himself just three vowels, E O and U. Now that is mastery!

A very high standard is being set here. A solving friend said ‘These clues were of the quality of the early Sabre – and that is no small praise.’ I wonder whether coming crosswords are going to live up to the standard set by this one and last week’s by Ron. Great, Shark!

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Listener 4183: Continental Drift by Shark

Posted by Dave Hennings on 20 April 2012

I thought we had tectonic plates last year! Perhaps Shark and the editors had forgotten about Phi’s tricky puzzle. Unlikely, so I guessed it had nothing to do with the way our planet is constantly being reformed. So what did Shark have in strore for us with his debut Listener. He has had a fair smattering of Inquisitors, EVs and Magpies. I have done a few of these, and have certainly enjoyed them.

Listener 4183With the across clues here, entries had to be jumbled before entry, which is what the wordplay led to. My initial reaction was that this would make it fairly easy, but a lot would depend on how tricky the clues were. Every down entry could be prefixed with an adjective, and they all had something in common, except one. That one would determine the highlighting that we were to make in the finished grid.

Starting on the acrosses as usual, 15ac Hammer almost hit salesmen (7), and the wordplay unequivocally gave SLOSREP. This was basically because I misread it as ‘salesman’ and had SLOS[H] + REP as the wordplay, instead of SLO[G] + REPS. Luckily the mistake came to light a mere hour and a half later! This also helps to explain why, for me, the grid was filled pretty much from the bottom upwards.

I was highly impressed with the clues which, for the most part, had nice surface readings. My favourite was probably See criminal lie to son to get flowers (7) leading to VIOLETS (V + LIETO* + S). That’s just my sense of humour, I’m afraid.

Listener 4183 My EntryAfter about 2½ hours, the grid was complete, but there seemed to be no initial connection between all the down entries. What could MUSTARD and NEEDLES have in common? COLLOPS at 12dn looked like the way in, but Chambers only gives Collop Monday and minced collops. After a few minutes, SASH, DOOR and FRIES in column 6 came to the rescue. All those could be prefixed by French, as could HEEL, LOAF and POX (!) elsewhere in the grid. Given the title, I looked up other European countries in Chambers, and felt suitably smug as all the other associations came to light. I think the one that I liked the most, since I’d not come across it before, was German Ocean – their name for the North Sea It made me feel a little less guilty about calling La Manche the English Channel!

After a good deal of thumbing through Chambers for European countries, I was left with the odd one out … VIOLETS, which could only be prefixed by AFRICAN. Now I’m sure that if I’d constructed this puzzle, I would have just asked solvers to write it in a space under the grid captioned Odd Man Out and left it at that. But not Shark. He positioned down entries such that after highlighting all the letters of AFRICA in the grid, we had a lovely outline of the continent. Did this self-imposed constraint make the puzzle ten times more difficult to construct? Perhaps Shark will tell us.
 

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Listener 4182, Breach of Contract: A Setter’s Blog by Ron

Posted by Listen With Others on 14 April 2012

It seems the jury is currently out as to whether a setter’s blog gives an interesting insight into the mind of the setter or is the crossword equivalent of whisking the screen away from the Wizard of Oz. While I’m undecided on the wider debate, I decided that the thoughts of a débutant setter may be of interest to potential setters who haven’t yet made the leap. If that’s not you, then please don’t feel the need to read any further.

I first set my mind to compiling a themed crossword about six years ago. It was called “Agenda Items or ______” and was based on the Walrus and the Carpenter. It had various examples of shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages and kings (with cole doing double duty) each of which was undefined and to be located in the final grid. Solvers had to locate an ironic description of the oysters, which could be used as an alternative title (“Pearls of Wisdom”). If I’m honest, once I’d thought of the oyster pun I couldn’t not write the crossword.

A number of years later I started to think seriously about trying to get a crossword published and my first thought was to dust off my “Agenda Items”. However a quick search on the Listener Crossword website revealed that an almost identical crossword had been printed in 2000 (right down to the references to “global warming” and “pigs might fly”). This forced me to start thinking afresh; while the W&C theme was fun, the themed crosswords I enjoy solving most aren’t the ones that simply require you to decode an interesting quotation or locate a string of relevant words ‘wordsearch style’, but where something relevant and thematic actually happens in the grid. I spent many weeks trying to come up with possible themes that would do this and finally came up with the idea for “Breach of Contract”; having the Pied Piper lure a line of children from their houses (clue answers) and lead them snaking them through the city of Hamelin and out of the city gates.

I worked out that a 12×12 grid with three lines of names was probably the maximum I could manage and still have a full set of down clues without any unchecked letters at the bottom (an important restriction for me given the lack of Germanic names in the back of Chambers). I trawled the internet for lists of suitable German names, narrowed them down to a shortlist that could be removed from longer words (highlighting any, like Eva or Otto, that provided numerous possibilities) and then experimented with putting them in various combinations so that I had workable word endings for down clues. Not much to say about the rest of the grid fill other than to say that it was a long and arduous process.

I liked the idea of having two different types of clues. The first would give the name of the protagonist (I’d already decided to use “Der Rattenfänger von Hameln” which provided a workable number of down clues and, being in the German language, would hopefully stay hidden for long enough). The second would use additional words in clues to provide a description of what was happening. I trawled through Goethe, Grimm and Browning for a helpful quotation that would explain all, but came up short. The ODQ gave the following from Browning, which is wonderful; while of no use to me, I’m sure there’s another crossword in there:

“Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.”

I gave up on quotations and settled on a self-composed message, reverting to Wikipedia and Brewers for inspiration. Brewers mentions versions of the story where the children wind up in Transylvania and form a new colony. Focusing on this aspect, I settled on “Kinder leave homes following entertainer to Transylvanian colonisation”. In order to help hide the Transylvanian, I disguised that part as “tot ran sylvan Ian”.

Given this was my first attempt, I asked a whole variety of people to test solve it, including someone who had never solved a barred crossword before and a seasoned Listener setter (a friend of a friend – it really is a small world). All of their feedback was invaluable, but most importantly persuaded me to re-think my use of Transylvania. Solvers were supposed to write the destination “Transylvania” under the grid, but it really wasn’t clear enough to be wholly unambiguous and that was a real problem. I toyed with variations – looking at options involving Koppelberg Hill/Koppenberg Mountain – but it was tough to hide them in a way that wouldn’t have given the game away too quickly. However, a number of my guinea-pigs had said that they had enjoyed the “tot ran sylvan Ian” and so I set about trying to make the whole message work in that way – I ended up with “Kind era ban don dig spur suing per former”, which is very nearly how it ended up in the final puzzle (a last minute comment moved me to swap “dig” for “home” – slightly less cryptic but definitely less forced).

I sent the crossword to be vetted – but then a bombshell! One of the vetters reported that there had been another Pied Piper crossword as recently as 2009. So recently, in fact, that the spreadsheet on the Listener website hadn’t been updated to include it. It felt like the Walrus and the Carpenter all over again and I was worried that all my hard work would all be for naught. Luckily the vetters were comfortable that Breach of Contract was sufficiently different to Motley Collection; Merlin’s offering was heavily rat-based and thankfully there’s not a sniff of vermin in mine.

And so probably the most important lesson of the many I learnt in the whole process is that if you want to be as sure as you can be that your idea is original, then look at the Listener website (with its searchable spreadsheet explaining themes for every puzzle since the year dot), but then double-check it against Dave Hennings’ database, which has detailed information on more recent Listeners (as I discovered too late) as well as Magpie, EV and Inquisitor puzzles – an invaluable resource.

Ron.

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Breach of Contract by Ron

Posted by shirleycurran on 13 April 2012


Three different types of clue . Now that was a challenge. One numpty attacked the across clues, almost immediately working out that some clues were leading to words that were longer than the allocated space, so clearly something had to be removed before they were entered into the grid. The first of these to yield was ‘Bats leave tree and move skywards again (6)’ That was a lovely surface reading (though our bats roost within the boxes that hold the roller blinds – not in trees) but we have that bad (or good?) habit of seeing beyond the surface reading. That word ‘bats’ led us to REELEVATE, which clearly needed three letters removing. We opted for VAT and suspected that this crossword had something to do with this week’s budget.

MAX appeared in ‘Split after military intelligence embraces game theory, looking to temper worst case scenario (4)’ We had MI and AX around NIM – three extra letters. (MAX tax increases in the budget – our first numpty red herring was already beginning to stink!)

Meanwhile a rather odd set of extra words was appearing; KIND, ERA, BAN, DON, HOME, SPUR, SUING, PER and FORMER. With delight, the same numpty triumphantly said ‘Kinder abandon homes pursuing performer’.

This dazzling pdm. corresponded almost exactly with the other numpty’s sudden understanding of the mention of a diacritic, as the phrase revealed by the misprints in definitions in down clues produced ??? RATTENFAN??? VON HAME?? I had beavered away at the misprints and some, of course, like VOGUISH/ROGUISH, SHOUTS/SCOUTS, HERALD/HARALD  and TREE JUICE/FREE JUICE could hardly hide their correct letter.

So there we were, under two hours and a delightful theme revealed. Our children used to be very distressed by the story of the Pied Piper who undertook a contract to rid Hamelin of rats and mice and enchanted them with his magic pipe, leading them through a door into a gloomy mountain. Of course, the stingy bureaucrats of Hamelin refused to pay him his due and he led all their children through a door into the dark mountain. Thus the door at the south-east corner of our grid.

Clearly the rats, mice and children had to head that way but we still had to find the victims. EVA (not VAT, of course) MAX, OTTO, ANKE, ELSA and ERNST were hidden in their ‘homes’ or words, (REELEVATE, DOUBLE-BOTTOM, MINIMAX, FLANKERED, INTELSAT) and we saw, with delight, that these words were forming a chain of children produced by the astonishing three empty rows at the bottom of the grid, but there was a minor red herring as we attempted to fit LARA into the triple column of children. We were still hunting for our last two Kinder, too.

But no! There are no Kinder called REF and SLEXA. Working backwards, as usual, we saw that we needed a RALF and an ERNST and that our children would be winding in boustrophedonic style behind the PIED PIPER. Thus we had to fit RALF into SUCAT? (this week’s conversation stopper – a soothing remedy, a SUCRALFATE!) and ERNST into BEIN (BERNSTEIN, of course). Eureka!

This was a fabulous compilation – a crossword with a complete tale neatly woven into it, with the pdms appearing just in the right order and a fine sense of satisfaction when it was completed. I am sure it will remain one of my favourites of the year. Many thanks, Ron.

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