This website is aimed at presenting something of an archive of my puzzles from the Listener and perhaps elsewhere, all in forms that can be printed out or tackled online.

 

In addition to this effort, I run a personal blog, rarely updated, and the cryptic crossword blog on the Listener website. The Listener website is not however a suitable site for the puzzles, links and other goodies I intend placing here.

 

Anyway, you will not be surprised to know that I enjoy mucking around on the old interwebby thing here. I do hope you enjoy some of the results of my efforts and indulgences.

I've been setting cryptic crosswords for the the Listener magazine in New Zealand since 1997.

 

My predecessor in the role, the late RWH (Ruth Hendry), had set the puzzles for 57 years. RWH's work was highly regarded and much loved but the style had remained largely unchanged since its beginnings, only partly cryptic, making extensive use of quotations and with a large proportion of straightforward synonym or even dictionary definition clues.  I took it to a totally cryptic form and did away with the quotations.

 

Similar changes had occured in British cryptic crosswords much earlier.

 

 

Some apologies

 

Skitey pants?

From time to time I feel I should have adopted an alias for my Listener puzzles as is the custom amongst cryptic crossword setters in the UK. Advertising my real name, a relatively rare one at that, does feel a little immodest in the circumstances. In fact I did intend adopting an alias when I first took on the job and, having procrastinated for a week or so about what it should be, phoned the Listener editor with my decision. This was well before my first puzzle appeared. I wasn't to know it, but back then the puzzle pages were printed weeks before the more currently topical parts of the magazine. I was surprised then to learn that it had already been printed. Too late. I was out!

 

Blunders

With about 20,000 clues written for the Listener, I suppose the odd mistake is understandable. Nevertheless, because every letter in every clue is likely to be critical, even the slightest typo in a crossword is far more reprehensible than if it were in the normal run of writing.

 

The last substantial blunder I know of was in crossword 746, a wrong letter in the anagram fodder. I can now only apologise.