'I should be grateful if you could favour me with a South African quadruped in six letters, beginning with Q.' Hannah, needless to say, learns her lesson and looks set to enjoy being rich and we end with Bunter returning to his newspaper puzzle: In Wodehouse, a crossword is frivolous when a typical answer is EMU for Sayers, time spent recalling Spinoza and the Russian equivalent of the mile is time well spent, not for a puzzle's improving qualities but for being a conscious act of enjoyment. EST: 'ον και μη 'ον = est and non est - the problem of being and not-being. ICTUS: Blow add V (five) and you get VICTUS (vanquished) the ictus is the stress in a foot of verse if the stress be misplaced the line goes lamely.Ģ.VI. and the annotated solution Sayers provides at the end of the book with the completed grid. 'Bid 'ον και μη 'ον farewell?' Nay, in this The sterner Roman stands by that which is Blow upon blow five more the vanquished Roman shows And if the foot slip one, on crippled feet one goesĢ.VI. The clues are of the early form and are not the sort of thing you might hope to knock off on a bus journey. 'He was a great man for acrostics before that, I understand them to say, but when cross-words came in, he threw away his acrostics and said he liked the new game better.' 'They say he took up cross-words as soon as they came in, and was remarkably quick at solving them, my lord, and inventing them. This being the 1920s, the "cross-word" still has a fussy hyphen and the puzzles themselves are still a novelty: The story reads like a real-life version of the Harry Enfield sketch Women: Know Your Limits here, though, we're judging it only on its portrayal of crosswords, and it scores high for having the actual grid and its clues over several pages and encouraging the reader to solve before reading on. Lord Peter and his sister agree: Hannah worries too much about social justice when she should be attending to getting her pretty head "properly shingled at Bresil's". In an unstated pun, just as the Meleager of Greek legend had to hunt a boar, Uncle Meleager has, in his mind, a bore in his sights. A woman who pretends to be serious is wasting her time and spoiling her appearance.' 'I have always held that woman is a frivolous animal. He wrote to her before he died to chastise her for thinking about politics: His thinking in setting this whimsical (wimseycal?) challenge is not pure love of wordplay. There's just one problem for the modern-day reader. Lord Peter is continuously announcing that he's taken with Uncle Meleager - "Uncle Meleager's a sport. This is a celebration of frivolity, remember: salvation through symbolic slapstick. Is Lord Peter put out about getting soaked? Not a bit. In case that's not frivolous enough, finding the clues is only half the challenge: it's only when Lord Peter falls into Uncle Meleager's pond - or as Sayers has it, his impluvium - that he finds the grid on its watery floor.
#His debut album was rhyme pays crossword series#
Spoiler-avoiders should look away for the next couple of paragraphs, though it will probably not be much of a surprise, given the theme of this series and the banner at the top of the page, that the location of the will is hidden in a crossword. The client is Hannah Marryat, who has been favoured in her wealthy uncle's will, but must undergo a cryptic and unspecified challenge if she's to find the document. 'Perhaps your lordship would be so good as to think,' he said hopefully, 'of a word in seven letters with S in the middle, meaning two.'Īs Lord Peter wafts about in his mauve silk pyjamas, anticipating the smell of buttered eggs - "very step he took into the bathroom was a conscious act of enjoyment" - crosswords form part of a paean to pleasure, for the rich and confident gentleman 'tec and for the lower orders alike.
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