Why Britain Made It Harder
There's a standard account of why Britain produced the cryptic crossword, and you'll have met it. Charades and riddles. Victorian parlour games. A classical education. A nation temperamentally fond of wordplay, doing what came naturally.
It's repeated constantly. It's also, on inspection, almost entirely unsourced.
What the specialists actually say
Go to the people who have done the work and the ancestry shrinks dramatically.
The tradition's principal historian limits the cryptic's descent to the acrostic and the word square - not parlour games in general, not riddles, not charades. The standard reference work on word games catalogues all those ingredients without ever asserting that the cryptic came from them. Writers who repeat the cultural version tend to hedge it when pressed. And no source connects Torquemada's style to a classical education, though the claim is made constantly about a man whose actual influences are reasonably well documented.
Even the decorative detail turns out to be shaky. "Queen Victoria composed acrostics" appears whenever this story is told. The 1861 book exists; the royal authorship is hedged by every serious writer who touches it.
The evidence points somewhere else entirely
In 2016 researchers surveyed expert cryptic solvers to find out who they actually are. If the classical-education story were right, you'd expect the humanities.
You do not get the humanities. Expert cryptic solvers skew heavily towards science and information technology - nearly a quarter of them working in IT. The researchers' own framing is the useful part: American crosswords are "primarily semantically-cued retrieval tasks", while the British cryptic is "an exercise in code-cracking detection work."
That's a description of engineering. The cryptic clue is not a literary form that happens to be difficult; it is an encoding problem with a natural-language surface, and the people who are best at it are the people who are good at encoding problems.
Nearly a quarter of expert cryptic solvers work in IT. The humanities barely feature.
The commercial answer
So why did Britain make it harder?
The best-evidenced explanation is not cultural. It is commercial, and it's a good deal less flattering than the parlour-game story.
British newspapers worked out in the 1930s that puzzles were extremely good for circulation. But the broadsheets had a problem: their readers couldn't be seen doing something as mindless as answering definitions. As one crossword writer puts it, a more challenging form was needed - one that a serious person could be observed doing on a train without embarrassment.
The cryptic solved a marketing problem. It made the crossword respectable for readers who considered themselves above crosswords.
The cryptic clue at its best is a genuine art form. But the reason it exists at all appears to be that The Times had spent the 1920s calling the crossword a national menace and needed a version its own readers could admit to enjoying.
Recall where that paper put its first crossword in 1930: the sports page. The cryptic is what happens next - the puzzle climbing back up the paper by making itself too hard to be embarrassing.
A footnote from Broadway
The best illustration of how strange all this looked from outside is Stephen Sondheim.
He came to the cryptic through a setter in The Nation, then began entering Ximenes' weekly clue competitions by post from New York, collecting seventeen honourable mentions and never once winning. "I never got past honorable mention," he said, "but I did get honorable mention."
In April 1968 he brought the form to America in the first issue of New York magazine, and explained it better than most British writers have managed:
"Bafflement, not information, is the keystone of a British puzzle. A good clue can give you all the pleasures of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution."
No parlour games, no classical education, no national temperament. A composer of musicals describes the cryptic as a machine for producing a specific emotional sequence - innocence, surprise, revelation, release - which is, of course, exactly what he did for a living.
He introduced Leonard Bernstein to cryptics. He later handed his collection of Listener puzzles to a young enthusiast named Will Shortz.