My Favorite Cryptic Puzzle in a Long Time

Every now and then, something comes along that breaks the mold.

Regular readers will know that I occasionally like to take a break from the hard but essential work of drawing attention to very silly words in order to harangue people about how much fun they could be having if they spent more time doing cryptic crossword puzzles. This week has provided an excellent opportunity to do just that in the form of an exceptional puzzle by the setter Picaroon in The Guardian that manages to do three deceptively hard things all at once: It offers something quite novel to the format. It fairly and consistently follows all the rules. And it’s easy! (Other setters can weigh in on this, but I’ve found that one of the very hardest parts of setting a cryptic puzzle is making clues that are both fun and gentle for a solver.) 

If you’d like to have a crack at it before I spoil some of the clues below, you can find Picaroon’s lovely April Fools puzzle here. But I enjoyed this puzzle so much that I thought it’d be fun for folks who may not be hardened cryptic solvers yet to take a look at its innards with me. (And if you want a brush-up on what-all is going on with cryptic puzzles, my quick cryptics crash course starts here.) 

Onto the puzzle! The conceit of the April Fools joke is that a typo-ridden draft of the puzzle intended for the editor’s eyes only has accidentally been published for all to see (it’s doubly funny because The Guardian, affectionately known to readers as The Grauniad, was renowned for its typos in the ’70s). The setter’s name is spelled wrong (“Picaron”), and the “Special Instructions” are a garbled filename that includes the wrong puzzle number in the extension. But despite its appearance as a private draft for the crosswords editor, each of the clues works perfectly without any special knowledge required of the solver. A few of my favorites:

Ran away with the Spanish [This needs work – ed.] (6)

The answer is ELOPED, a word that means “ran away with,” and which can also be constructed from the other elements of the clue: El (“the,” in Spanish), Op. (“work” as in the musical abbreviation for opus, which means “work”), and Ed. (not the editor in this case, but the suffix for a simple past tense word). Repunctuating the clue slightly, that’s: RAN AWAY WITH = “The,” Spanish. [This needs] “work” + “-ed.”  

Latin song? [Needs rewriting, along with 1 Down] (6)

This clue is a partial anagram (as we’re told explicitly by “needs rewriting”). The answer is LOSING, a word that means “Down” (the definition part of the clue is at the end this time), and which can be constructed out of “L” (a common abbreviation for “Latin”) + “I” (the Roman numeral for “1”) and the letters of SONG. If you repunctuate the clue, you can see this more clearly: “Latin” + “song” needs rewriting along with “I” = DOWN.

Expression of understanding [A bit imprecise – ed.] (1,3)

Despite the novelty of the note to the editor, this is a simple, classic “hidden” clue. The answer, I SEE (an “expression of understanding”) can be found in “a bit” of “imprecise — ed.” Repunctuated, that’s: EXPRESSION OF MISUNDERSTANDING = A bit: imprecISE Ed.

Rule out / what spin doctors do [Faulty clue – ed.] (8)

Another triumph of this puzzle is that the setter is at great pains not to repeat the same mechanic across different clues. This is our third “ed.” in a clue, which works nicely for the theme, but it’s also our third distinct use of the “ed” conceit. In the first, it was the -ed suffix for a past tense word. In the second it was part of a hidden clue. And here, it makes up two letters of a partial anagram. The answer to this one, defined by “rule out,” is PRECLUDE. It’s a combination of P.R. (what spin doctors do) and an anagram (indicated by “faulty”) of “clue ed.” So: RULE OUT = “what spin doctors do” + faulty “clue ed.” Neat!

Barrack and Michelle ultimately getting huge backing (4)

Because of its clever theme, this puzzle can also get away with outrageous typos that just wouldn’t feel right in a different context. It does this in a few different ways across various clues, but I’ll end with my favorite. The answer here is GIBE — a secondary meaning of “barrack,” which occurs here in keeping with the theme as an “accidental” misspelling of Barack Obama’s first name. We get to “GIBE” by taking the final letter of “Michelle” (Michelle ultimately), adding it to “big” (huge), and spelling the whole thing backwards (backing). Thus: BARRACK = michellE, ultimately, getting “huge” — backing. (E + BIG, reversed.)

Anyway, congrats to Picaroon on a scorcher of a puzzle. It’s one of the great remaining delights of the increasingly dreary Internet when you come across something like this, where someone has used their craft and their creativity to breathe new life into a familiar format just to make us smile.