It is an old saw in the newspaper business that while you can get almost anything wrong – the scorers in the cup final, the winner of the 4.10 at Haydock – and few readers will bat an eyelid, if you make a mistake in the crossword puzzle then you will be dealing with complaints for weeks. Crossword lovers are obsessive, and their howls of displeasure if you put in the wrong answer for seven across will be anything but cryptic.
By their followers, setters are regarded as something akin to folk heroes, even if they are only known to most by their aliases. When the great Guardian setter John Graham, universally known by his nom de plume Araucaria, announced in a series of clues in one of his puzzles that he had terminal cancer, it unleashed a flood of affection among readers. One said he had planted a monkey puzzle tree in honour of Mr Graham’s moniker. As a Cambridge-educated pillar of the establishment, Graham – a Church of England priest – fitted the usual mental image of a crossword devotee, or cruciverbalist. Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Morse, was another enthusiast and named his detective after a fellow competitive solver, the Lloyds Bank chairman Sir Jeremy Morse.
