Alan Connor 

Crossword book club: Patrick Hamilton’s Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse

The author has given us the clues. Can we fashion them into a puzzle?
  
  

A drawing of Patrick Hamilton by Frank E Slater.
A drawing of Patrick Hamilton by Frank E Slater. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

We have Patrick Hamilton to thank for the term “gaslighting”. In his 1938 play Gas Light, Jack Manningham tampers with the lights and employs various other tricks to convince his wife, Bella, that she is imagining things and, by implication, losing her mind. By the 1960s, “gaslight” had become a useful verb.

A useful verb, from a depiction of an unlovely relationship. The relationships in our current reading, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, are, if anything, worse. Hamilton gives painstaking detail on the inner lives of his characters. Since those characters are either irredeemably sadistic or hopelessly foolish, the reader needs to be in the right mood.

Sometimes I found myself putting the book out of reach because it had overwhelmed me with despair. In a different mood, the same pages had me roaring with laughter. An unambiguously funny passage is Mr Stimpson’s attempt – “grimly determined not to surrender” – to solve a crossword (or, as he thinks of them, “one of the beastly things”).

Hamilton gives us all of the clues (“the following objectionable, sly, whimsical gibberish”). It’s a quick-crossword version of Victor Meldrew’s attempt to solve a baffling cryptic, which we have looked at here.

The novel begins:

All the characters in this book are imaginary. So also are Mr Stimpson’s Crossword Puzzles, the clues to which the reader is advised not to be beguiled into attempting to solve.

I know a challenge when I hear one being issued. And the challenge is this. Readers, can we give answers to the clues, ideally ones which will fit a 13-by-13 grid?

Across
1. Cartographer’s business.
8. Lowland reels perhaps.
9. Diverges.
10. Flies at sea.
11. False.
14. Boredom.
15. Many of these make one.
18. Jenny––––me when we met
(Leigh Hunt).
19. Mean Lady (Anag.).
21. Of course.
23. Northern ‘lights’.
24. Both ways.
25. Illuminated.

Down
1. Shy girls do this.
2. Extremely small.
3. Rigid.
4. Not permitted.
5. Latin for scales.
6. Plant leaps (Anag.).
13. Unrealised.
14. 19 across would like this.
16. Fruitful.
17. Perhaps.
18. Beginning.
20. Rough justice.
22. More than edible to unbelievers.

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. We can assume that various of the clues are not quite as he read them. I like to imagine that it should have read, say, “Mean lads (Anag.)” for DALESMAN, which could make the answer to 14 down something like TEA or ALE.

For a similar reason (that is, to inhabit the realm of possibility), we must ignore the clues’ numbers and, indeed, the order they are presented here. And I’ve imagined that 22 down might be something like CREDIBLE and 23 across perhaps KENS. Perhaps.

Our next book

Suggestions for future book club reading are very welcome. In the meantime, our next tome is a collection of thoughts about puzzles, along with the puzzles themselves. Yes, it’s Boatman: The Second 50.

Other puzzling books

Find a collection of explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs at alanconnor.com

The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

CAPTCHA

*