Listen With Others

The idea for One Across came from learning the terms parallel and cross cousin in a quiz, and noticing how the directions also fit crossword entries. I started building the grid after my first Listener suggestion was rejected for the average word length being too short. It seemed like the easiest grid to build of the ideas I’d had. There weren’t actually that many pairs of famous cousins (a list of 30 Celebrities You Won’t Believe Are Related would include 25 people you’ve never heard of) so I was pleased to find four pairs with workable names, work out exactly what kind of cousin each pair were, and then fit them into a puzzle. 

At this point I was still thinking of this as grid-filling practice. It was when I remembered the term cousin-german that I decided to go on with the clues. I like Listeners where the whole puzzle is thematically linked – where the cluing gimmick does more than give you an extra instruction that could have been preamble. I immediately both wanted to write this and dreaded having to do it with just one year of schoolboy German.

Cluing took a while; the first thing I found was that the grid was pretty constrained and that COHYPONYM couldn’t be removed. There are some words you don’t want to define and you also don’t want to write wordplay for, so I was delighted to get a decent clue, with the lovely gift = poison. I wrote the German clues first with a list of ‘false friends’. Some obviously went with one answer or another – like bier and ale – but most took a lot of headscratching. The extra letter clues were almost relaxing afterwards.

I sent this off to the editors and didn’t expect to hear back. The immediate reply was ‘we’ve got a backlog of 50 submissions to go through’ and I started worrying that the inclusion of living people wouldn’t be okay. So I was amazed to see my puzzle would be published. 

I’ve got to thank the editors for their work with my clues. In particular, my original clue for NEELE used ‘alt rock’ to disguise the pointy rock definition of needle. Roger and Shane worked out that neele never meant that, but reclued it whilst keeping the spirit of my original (as if writing partly German clues isn’t hard enough).

My pseudonym is the obvious one with first name Richard and middle name Leo. Thanks to everyone who solved this puzzle, whether you liked it or not. I’m still learning and so I hope you enjoy the next one more!

Lionheart