City of secrets author crossword code#

A few days later Neptune (which was the name given to the naval operations) and Overlord itself appeared in the puzzle.Īfter interviewing the compiler, a schoolteacher named Leonard Dawe, the investigators were satisfied that he was totally innocent of any attempt to pass information to the enemy.

City of secrets author crossword code#

Perhaps the biggest puzzle of all, however, came during the Second World War in 1944 when a crossword compiler was hauled before military intelligence on suspicion of giving away secrets.Īnswers in this particular newspaper crossword over several days had included Utah, Omaha and Mulberry, all of which were code words in Operation Overlord, which was the plan culminating in the D-Day landings. The Americans continued with mainly straight definitions in their clues until the Sixties when it is said that the composer Stephen Sondheim, a great enthusiast of all types of puzzle, brought the British style of cryptic crosswords across the Atlantic. There had been occasional cryptic clues before that date but now truly puzzling puzzles began to be produced with all the clues cryptic. It had a pencil attached for the benefit of solvers and was an immediate success.Īlthough Arthur Wynne had emigrated from England to the US at the age of 19, the British rapidly became world leaders in this fi eld with the introduction of cryptic crosswords in 1925. In the same year, the first book of crosswords was published in the US. The crossword craze had already spread to Britain where our sister paper the Sunday Express became the first newspaper with a crossword in 1924. The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten.” In 1925 the New York Times wrote a strong criticism of crosswords ending: “Fortunately, the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. It proved very popular and immediately became a regular feature, despite the fact that the answers included some highly unusual words.Īfter a few weeks, apparently due to an error by a typesetter, the name changed from Word-Cross to Cross-Word, which soon became so familiar that it began to be spelt as a single word without a hyphen.ĭespite the success of Wynne’s new puzzle in The New York World, it was not universally approved of even in the city of its birth. Unlike modern crosswords, the answers to the clues were to be entered on to a diamond shaped (rather than rectangular) grid, and his original crossword had the word FUN already written as the first entry. It appeared under the name Word-Cross on the Fun page of the comics section of The New York World newspaper. Instead it was Liverpool-born Arthur Wynne who is generally credited with coming up with the idea we all recognise today as a crossword. There had been earlier word puzzles, including an Italian sort of crossword in 1890 which had clues to words to be inserted on to a 4x4 grid, but there were no shaded squares.