52: Ultimo by Arsinoë
The Beginning Of The Beginning
Toward the end of Sue Grafton’s N Is For Noose, private detective Kinsey Millhone finds a desk blotter with a generic calendar for the month of February (with two days crossed out) written out in the corner. It turns out to be the template for a simple cipher, where the alphabet — written vertically by days — corresponds to the normally-written dates of the calendar in a not-completely-expected way.
So, during the summer of 2006, when I decided I was going to try to compose
- an actual crossword (it had been a while)
- a crossword of temporal specificity (as I hadn’t tried to do that before)
- a puzzle that might be rated A or B on the Magpie scale
that code serendipitously came back to mind. So I had a reasonable-looking theme — February 2007 — and, usefully, an absolute deadline.
And when I discovered that Groundhog Day could be laid out in the shape of a heart (representative of Valentine’s Day), the puzzle started to take shape: a February-based code, some number of answers using that code, and — as the indication of which two days would be excluded from the code — that heart-shaped GROUNDHOG DAY hidden in the centre of the grid.
Translation Issues
While the presence of Groundhog Day in the grid would immediately direct American solvers to the second of February, that probably wouldn’t be sufficient for a predominantly British audience. And as there was very little chance that this puzzle would appear before American cryptic fans, some additional indication was going to be necessary.
Fortunately, thirty seconds of research revealed that Candlemas also occurs on the second of February; even more fortunately, CANDLEMAS could be arranged in the shape of a V and placed beneath the heart in the grid.
Another issue: the calendar itself — specifically, what would be the first day of the week? While the American week invariably begins on Sunday and ends on Saturday, the British week would appear to start on Monday — most of the time. After a couple of e-mail exchanges (and a lot of looking at calendars), I finally decided that this puzzle’s week would start on Monday — but the puzzle would need to have an additional indication of that fact.
February Is The Dullest Month
I had a theme, I’d worked out how the theme should work, and I even had the hope of this crossword’s publication (as one of the Magpie’s editors had indicated that a slot might be found for a good enough puzzle). But what I didn’t have was a set of thematic answers to be encoded.
I didn’t think that would be a problem; surely, it wouldn’t be too hard to find a reasonable-looking list of six or eight February-related answers. Wrong.
The possibilities (without Valentine’s Day) turned out to be astonishingly meager: there was the amethyst (February’s birthstone), and a few people (Washington, Lincoln, Darwin) known for being born during the month. That left other holidays: but the best known (Carnival/Fasching/Mardi Gras, Chinese New Year) depend on other calendars, and thus would only be incidentally associated with February. Just as unhelpfully: all of these possibilities were at least six letters long — this would make filling the perimeter quite difficult.
I actually reached the point of considering using four ten-letter answers: two presidents (WASHINGTON and ABE LINCOLN) and two Roman festivals (QUIRINALIA and LUPERCALIA). That was also the point where I nearly decided to junk the puzzle.
Of course, there was always the possibility of choosing a set of answers at random and encoding them, but that just felt like an inelegant kludge; there would be no good reason why some answers would be encoded and some would not. Having found no other satisfactory solution to this question, I simply decided to recapitulate the code itself in the first and last rows of the grid.
An Excess of Creativity
One reason why I fell back upon the recapitulation of the code was that I’d found what I thought would be an interesting way of indicating the alphabet. For example, ABC is a major television network, def is a synonym for excellent, and so on — in this way, the entire alphabet bar R and J could be defined. And those definitions could be strung together; for example:
Disney network drama: “Romeo & Juliet: An Eighteenth-Century Affair”
could give ABC (Disney network), NO (drama), R (Romeo), J (Juliet), and XYZ (An Eighteenth-Century Affair).
And the hint that Monday was the first day of the week could be given by additional words scattered among these strings of definitions — another issue solved.
Another idea: because the alphabet would be entered sequentially by dates (across) and then vertically by days (down), the “Across” and “Down” headings in the clue list could then do double duty as instructions on how to enter the alphabet in the calendar template. And because those headings (at least in the Magpie) are the only items in boldface type aside from the puzzle’s title, those instructions could be phrased as being “provided (with emphasis) by the clue list.”
These were, I thought, interesting ideas — possibly too interesting for a puzzle which wasn’t intended to push the metaphorical envelope. (To say nothing of the likelihood that what I thought was interesting and inventive would be interpreted by anyone else as needlessly arcane and confusing.)
The Grid And The Clues
Since the rest of this puzzle’s thematic execution (such as the instruction to use the calendar for February 2007) could be given by the title and the preamble, the remainder of the grid and its accompanying clues wouldn’t need to incorporate any additional gimmicks (letters latent, extraneous letters, etc.). Consequently — even though the thematic execution became far more complex than originally intended — there would still be a chance that this crossword could still achieve a B rating.
The grid: its slightly odd dimensions (13×12) were dictated by the hidden heart and V shapes; with thirteen rows, those shapes would either have to be pushed too close together or too far apart. And given that 45 letters (19 hidden in the grid, 26 in the first and last rows) out of 156 had already been accounted for, there couldn’t be that many possible fills anyway.
In an attempt to compensate for my previous failure to incorporate additional thematic material in the encoded answers, I did try to make a grid that was at least alphabetically interesting. And by happy accident I ended up with a double pangram.
I had already decided not to dig through my Big Bag of Crazy — so no Continental Divides, no knocked-over letters, no orbiting fools changing hands, no alphabetical transliterations, no prime-letter selections, no potted histories of the Habsburg Empire or of the religious development of India. Unsurprisingly, the clue-writing process went remarkably quickly.
With the clues written, this crossword was ready to go. And I even had the perfect title for this one — a title that would direct the solver to February 2007 without giving away the theme immediately. One word: Instant.
Editorial Improvements
For a number of reasons, I doubted that Instant would survive the Magpie editorial process; for example, I still wondered if Groundhog Day would be familiar enough to a largely British audience. So I was surprised that the editors accepted the crossword for publication — with several major changes.
One change: that overly cute usage of the Across and Down headings as instructions for the entry of the alphabet in the calendar template was eliminated; instead, those directions would be given explicitly in the preamble. Another change: the hint regarding Monday would be given by pre-highlighted squares; fortuitously, the necessary letters were already nicely spaced out in the grid.
The biggest change: those strings of definitions were to be eliminated entirely; some other way of indicating the contents of the first and last rows was required.
With such amendments, Instant became a substantially different crossword — one that needed to be examined by another test solver. So I sent that solver a revised version of the puzzle which tried to solve that question of the indication of the first and last rows of the grid by leaving the identification of those rows’ contents as an exercise in deduction.
There was an interesting cruciverbal-philosophical question here — the original version would have used the alphabet to construct its coded equivalent in the grid; this version would have used the encoded rows in the grid to deduce the alphabet’s role as the basis of the code. So I thought that this solver’s experience with Instant might also shed some light on a more general question: do solvers prefer to encode or decode?
A Serious Problem
However, this solver didn’t exactly get around to addressing any lofty questions of cruciverbal theory; he was more concerned with a couple of serious weaknesses in the puzzle. First, he was expecting some sort of interesting message in the encoded rows, and was disappointed to discover that they simply comprised the encoded form of the alphabet. And second, instead of simply constructing that February-based code, he actually wanted to use it.
That second issue could theoretically be resolved by simply providing a thematically relevant string of encoded text somewhere in the puzzle. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any obvious place to put such text — the clues were set (to encode any of them (or parts of them) would have been completely arbitrary). And while it might have been possible to add some encoded text to the preamble, there didn’t appear to be any previous Magpie puzzles that had done so. The least bad option I had was to add the encoded form of February (IESGRLGH) as a subtitle, and to hope that would be sufficient.
The question of how to deal with the first and last two rows still remained — and it remained stubbornly resistant to any satisfactory solution. In the end, I simply gave up — when I prepared the final version of Instant for the editors, its preamble simply stated that those rows “comprise an encoded form of the alphabet.” And while this language was at best mediocre, it at least wouldn’t raise solvers’ expectations unreasonably.
The Final Version
At the last minute (not simply figuratively — pretty much as close to literally as the difference of five time zones would allow), I came up with the idea of using ordinary clues for ALPH and ABET to indicate that the first and last rows of the grid would comprise an encoded form of the alphabet. The more I thought about this idea, the more I preferred it to the previous three-and-a-half alternatives; it wasn’t great, but it was something.
Unfortunately, it was a something that I hadn’t been able to have tested before the Magpie’s deadline. And with this continuing uncertainty about the crossword’s thematic execution, the editors had understandably decided to bump the puzzle from the February issue.
I then sent the crossword — now with new clues for ALPH and ABET, but shorn of its now-imperfect title Instant — to another test solver, who raised no objections to the puzzle’s thematic execution. And at least a new title was found easily enough, as “ultimo” refers to the previous month in the same way that “instant” refers to the current month.
So the final final version was redelivered to the Magpie’s editors, who decided that it was good enough to be published — and I thank them for that privilege.
Ultimo (IESGRLGH) consequently appeared in Magpie issue No. 52, March 2007.
Concluding Notes
- Despite my original intention to compose a puzzle rated A or B on the Magpie scale, Ultimo still ended up with a C rating. I would suspect that the February-based code itself was enough to boost Ultimo‘s rating to a C.
- There were a couple of glitches with the published puzzle: one of its clues was accidentally omitted (likely due to a cut-and-paste error on my part), and the preamble should have been clearer as to what required delineation (it could be read as an instruction to delineate the observances (the characters GROUNDHOG DAY & CANDLEMAS) as opposed to the shapes they formed in the grid).
- Although February is the most obvious choice for the sort of calendar-based code used in this puzzle, it’s possible to construct a similar code for any other month. For example, a code based on December 2007 could be constructed simply by omitting that month’s five Sundays from the calendar. (Might such a code be used for an Advent-themed puzzle?)
- I should have looked further afield for a set of thematically-related words to be encoded; instead of limiting that search to persons or celebrations specifically connected to the month of February, I could have come up with words relating more generally to the calendar or the history of coding, for example. And if I had been able to assemble a decent set of words to be encoded, Ultimo would likely have turned out better than it did.
- In the end, though, I think Ultimo worked.
(Originally published at Listen With Others on 11 May
2007.)