CTS #20: The Moriarty and the Contest Crossword

Sherlock Holmes is the puzzler’s hero. With his hag-ridden, obsessive energy and relentless intelligence, he solves and solves and solves, saving lives, justice and country in the process. He embodies the principle that everything can be solved, and solved correctly.

Moriarty is his opposite number, or as close as anyone can get. He actually killed Holmes once, his triumph undone only by the public’s insatiable demand for more Sherlock stories. He embodies the principle opposite to Holmes’s, that it is possible to trap reason, to defeat it. But how do you defeat the ultimate solver? By letting him feel the rush of victory on a wrong solution. By feeding him a red herring.

Last week, we presented the famous Simpsons crossword, which had a serviceable if vague Groucho theme, and an extra Vector Three that solvers had to discover on their own. Such trickiness might seem to make Moriartyish all by itself, but trickiness and gettability are too vague to serve as a basis for classification. No, a puzzle becomes a Moriarty by hiding its thematic connections in places no other genre explores… generally in the clues, or in some special combination of the clues and the answers.

At the climax of that Simpsons episode, “Lisa Bouvier” confronts Homer about DUMB DAD, and discovers Will Shortz and Merl Reagle sitting in their living room, for no adequately explored reason. Shortz, showing typical concern for a solver who hasn’t yet reached her maximum possible level of satisfaction, tells Lisa that she missed Homer’s other message, hidden not in the answers but in the clues:

Having bribed, or possibly blackmailed, Shortz and Reagle into including this “extra” message, Homer moves Lisa to tears, and she abandons her “Bouvier” phase. A heartwarming ending! Hardly seems to fit the picture of the malevolent “Napoleon of Crime,” does it?

But that anguished face Lisa makes when she realizes she hasn’t actually solved all of the puzzle there was to solve? Well, the Simpsons might make that face every seven minutes or so, but on a solver, it’s a sign of a classic Moriarty.

At the time of the puzzle’s release, even longtime critics Amy Reynaldo and Rex Parker missed the extra message just like Lisa did, and complained about some of the puzzle’s relatively awkward cluing, without realizing why it was somewhat necessary. In the comments on Parker’s blog, Reynaldo and Puzzlegirl both griped about the reference to Marisa Tomei’s little-seen film Loverboy, which lent its L to “DEAR LISA.” If only the episode had come out three years later, Reagle and Shortz could have referenced The Lincoln Lawyer instead! If only! If only.

A more complex theme hidden in both the grid and the clues can be found in Matt Gaffney’s recent “Plot Device,” which also offers a new twist on the Vector Three. As hinted by the puzzle’s title and the answers BATTLESHIP, WAR GAME and DESTROYER, Gaffney treats the grid as an analogue to the 15×15 structure of a game of Battleship. Six clues include coordinates that could be found in the game, and the answers to those clues each include the square that corresponds to those coordinates. In order:

A-1 targets: STEAKS
Excellent source of vitamin B12: LIVER
Exercise with an F-15, say: WAR GAME
Part of the G7: ITALY
City that I-10 runs through: MOBILE
K2‘s superior: EVEREST

These coordinates, read in sequence, spelled out SIMILE… which would not have been that much of a payoff if Gaffney hadn’t led into his crossword by announcing that the “contest answer” for the week would be a literary device of some sort.

The contest crossword is a strange animal in that it almost always crosses over with at least one other type. Like the Moriarty, it often isn’t quite solved when it appears to be solved. Unlike many Moriartys, though, it usually includes a text lead-in that announces the terms of the true solution. (The original draft of the previous sentence had the phrase “final solution,” but, you know, I didn’t need the e-mails.)

Gaffney has been running a regular crossword contest for years, and nobody’s explored the form like he has. Let’s have a quick look at some of his recent works, plus one that we promised we’d look at earlier, in light of the genres we now know.

In the aforementioned “There’s More To This Tale…” theme entries LEANT LATER, EILAT LATTE, OLETA ECLAT and CLEAT LATHE all contain two instances of the letters in “TALE,” plus one extra letter. The puzzle asks for “the last name of a well-known novelist” as the official “contest answer.” Since those eight added letters have no apparent extra significance, many solvers focused on them and realized they anagrammed to Crichton, as in Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and many other works. (Rich T. Noc, the writer of the fabulous but severely obscure Missed Chances, was bitterly disappointed to learn about this.)

“Going Shopping” (not shown here) uses a substitution theme to arrive at natural phrases from antonymous pairs (like “Going/Stopping”). The letters that disappeared in the substitution process could anagram to NIGHT, and the contest asked for “the opposite of the word referenced by the five theme entries,” dropping a hint to the “opposite” aspect of the theme and giving DAY as the final contest answer.

“Cut The Deck” uses a Groucho theme to phonetically spoonerize the names of cards, and combines it with a hidden Vector Three, because the numbers of those cards, pre-spoonerization, correspond to the numbers of four squares in the grid, which spell out J-A-C-K, the contest answer.

Finally, there’s the oddity “Be Counted,” which asks contest entrants to supply the name of a well-known musical group. The answer is THE B-52’S, signified by the 52 B’s in the puzzle’s grid.

So… what do we call this one? Of the existing genres we’ve mentioned, letter bank is probably closest, and I’m tempted to declare it a twist on the letter bank and call it a day. But that doesn’t quite fit, because there’s nothing that unusual about the total number of letters used, and not used, in this grid. (Its total letter-count is ABCDEGHILMNORSTUVWY, 19 letters, perfectly normal.) What’s notable is the frequency, Kenneth. And I think such a letter-frequency puzzle might qualify as a subset of the freakshow puzzles, a relative of the letter bank but not part of it.

Gaffney has even done such a letter-frequency puzzle at least once before, composing a grid that uses only the letters found in a typical game of Scrabble. And as crossword critic Joon points out, B-focused puzzles are not original with Gaffney, either (props to Clive Probert). Part of me would like to go back and edit the “Freakshow” chapter as if I always knew this subset would be there, but I’m doing my best to keep my communications with all y’alls open and honest.

(Since crossword fans love to talk about “Scrabbly fill” and high concentrations of Q’s, Z’s and X’s, someone will have to draw a line between what’s merely Scrabbly and what’s lettter-frequency. Choose wisely, critics. Wars have been started over less.)

I shouldn’t be surprised. Not only Gaffney’s feature, but the contest crossword genre in general, is where some of the most creative work in the field is done. Whenever The New York Times feels it necessary to add a text explanation, you know they’re getting sexperimental. The contest is fertile soil for the crossword genres of tomorrow.

But to wrap up our look at the tricksters, we’ll be heading back to more familiar territory… the most popular kind of trickster based on frequency of appearances, yet often the most aggravating in the early stages of its solving. Yes, next week, it’ll be time for the