Honest artisan, strange singer (5,7)

Let's stick with great American singers. Frank Sinatra, apparently, was a big New York Times crossword fan. Let that sink in for a moment.

As Alan Connor in the Guardian points out though, the NYT puzzle - indeed US crosswords in general - are more like our quick crosswords than the cryptics you get in the broadsheets: 

For the NYT, the solver needs a mix of approaches involving more general knowledge and non-English vocab, and much less wordplay...

It would be invidious to privilege either the UK or the US style of crosswording; for better or worse, the ones Sinatra did would be more appropriate training for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire than they would for Bletchley Park.

Invidious inschmidious. He's being too polite. It needs to be said that the Great British Cryptic Crossword is a far superior puzzle.

Or it can be. Too often - with the Times crossword anyway, which is my regular - you know what the answer is, but it takes some effort to work out why that's the answer, and when you do it's not so much with a cry of delight as with an exasperated "Oh for f**** sake". But with a good clue, that moment of enlightenment is a moment of joy. Of which, I think we can all agree, we need as many as we can get.

As it happens yesterday's Times crossword (£) was one of the best for a while. I'll pick out three clues in particular which had, for me, that special magic:

4 down: Divide by radius to get x or y, so to speak (5)

Answer: river. Divide (rive) by (next to) radius (r)...to get x (the River Exe) or y (the River Wye) so to speak (ie as they're pronounced). Brilliant. The mathematical tenor of the clue is entirely misleading.

12 down. Most important, as he is in Manchester, not Rotherham or Sheffield (7)

Answer: central. Means most important, and the letters he are in the centre of the word Manchester but not in the centre of the words Sheffield or Rotherham.

10 across. Not the kind of surgeon you would want, confusing artery and vein (10)

An easy one for cryptic crossword regulars, this: obviously an anagram of artery and vein. Answer: veterinary. It's just somehow satisfying how it all fits together. You wouldn't want a surgeon who confuses an artery and a vein; no more would you want a veterinary surgeon.

You got the clue in the post title (adapted, I'll admit, from Alan Connor's piece)? Yes I know: too easy. 

Comments

[Dom]

Auden was a crossword buff. In a poem about defecation, he noted that "revelation came to Luthor in a privy. Crosswords have been solved there."

We have cryptic crosswords, but only The Nation publishes them, and I haven't gone back since the author, Frank Lewis, died. The clues are somehow different though. "Tempts by breaking all the rules" (lures).

You're underestimating the NYT puzzle. The big difference is that every letter must have both a vertical and horizontal word attached to it, and the black squares must be symetrical. Will Shortz encourages something like a cryptic clue. "V" (The center of gravity).

[Mick H]

Didn't know Auden was a crossword buff.

I think it's something of a male ritual (maybe female too, though it seems a very male thing somehow), to pick up the crossword on the way to the bathroom. A Freudian might want to make something of it, but, as I'm not a Freudian, I don't.

[Dom]

Well, you mentioned Freud. Here is more of Auden's poem:

Freud did not invent the
Constipated miser:
Banks have letter boxes
Built in their façade
Marked For Night Deposits,
Stocks are firm or liquid,
Currencies of nations
Either soft or hard.

[Mick H]

Hmm. I think I see what he's driving at.