The Guardian Quick Crosswords 1: A collection of more than 200 entertaining puzzles (Guardian Puzzle Books)

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I don’t think there are any valid anagrams that work at 19 across, which is perhaps a sign of the state of Mr Stimpson’s mind. I have a lot of admiration for the more prolific setters like Paul and (in their day) Araucaria and Rufus. Incredibly, Sayers tells us in a footnote that she has omitted a part of the conversation about whether RBEXMG might represent a date in a certain format “for brevity’s sake”.

Like the maps of a cathedral close that we are given near the beginning, the puzzle takes up most of various pages while a canon and a reverend execute an admirably protracted solve. The ecclesiastical setting might make today’s reader expect tweeness – but Gilbert, in his first novel, promptly shares a wryness and droll cynicism. Afrit’s puzzles for the Listener often received zero correct entries and a few years after Have His Carcase was published, he set Listener 397, which had a Playfair square in the middle of the grid and made reference to Lord Peter.Forget riddles, conundrums or Sudoku, the crossword is the original and best word puzzle and it has truly stood the test of time. Since those characters are either irredeemably sadistic or hopelessly foolish, the reader needs to be in the right mood. More fool the adapters: the conversation could only have been more delightful if our heroes had digressed into discussing Playfair’s creator, Charles Wheatstone, who also found time to invent the English concertina and an electronic device that went on to be a key aspect of Scientology. There are plenty of fish to choose from; they often have short names amenable to using in anagram clues, and we tend to find them funny. Biography: The Guardian is an award-winning British newspaper that consistently rates as the most-trusted newspaper in the country.

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Michael Gilbert himself, and Close Quarters in particular, belong to neither the “cosy crime” nor the “hard-boiled” camp. Lord Peter is fond of a puzzle too; as is often the case in whodunnits, being a solver of crosswords is handy when you are trying to solve a murder.

Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Photograph: Farooq Khan/EPA-EFE View image in fullscreen Navigating the waters … a boatman on the Dal Lake in Srinagar. The notes on your 96th puzzle include the unlikely phrase “This is the last fish-based puzzle in this collection”. but I feel a connection to it through the Listener’s occasional use of Playfair codes, which continued through that puzzle’s relocation to the Saturday Times and to this day.There’s something oddly organic about Grid 61, which I think of as having a black twig across the middle of the grid, and I like all the grids that make geometric shapes. When at last we find the important coded message in Have His Carcase, Lord Peter Wimsey delegates the decoding to the whodunnit novelist with whom he has spent much of the story flirting. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. It’s a quick-crossword version of Victor Meldrew’s attempt to solve a baffling cryptic, which we have looked at here. When Have His Carcase was published, the crossword was a novelty; the Guardian had had a puzzle for just three years.