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. If you add in three drink-based puzzles and eight with some other type of food, that would make 16 puzzles with food-and-drink themes, which rather echoes your experience. You seem to treat the various Guardian grids like physical spaces, like your metaphor of the Cluedo secret passageway. Since those characters are either irredeemably sadistic or hopelessly foolish, the reader needs to be in the right mood. The most rewarding themes have the tightest focus: early on, I started a list of ideas based on fruit and veg, but quickly found that I had enough vegetable clues, so I put the fruit on one side.

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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. The only thing we’ve found,” went on Lord Peter, “is Chambers dictionary, and we didn’t find that this evening because Miss Vane had found it before, while she was engaged in wasting her time on crosswords instead of getting on with her writing. In the meantime, our next book is The Twelve Quizzes of Christmas by Frank Paul, which we’ll discuss in November. Biography: The Guardian is an award-winning British newspaper that consistently rates as the most-trusted newspaper in the country.Michael Gilbert himself, and Close Quarters in particular, belong to neither the “cosy crime” nor the “hard-boiled” camp. 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”). I save the best unused clue and release it as a tease in the forum once known as Twitter, then any theme clues left over go into a new theme file. 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.

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Itching Down is recognisably Ditching in many places, though John inserted several parts of other villages that he enjoyed drawing. In the meantime, our next tome is a collection of thoughts about puzzles, along with the puzzles themselves. With a wide variety of clues from a vast range of subjects, these crosswords will provide a stern examination of your lexical knowledge, but are concise enough to be solved in bite-sized chunks.

It’s a quick-crossword version of Victor Meldrew’s attempt to solve a baffling cryptic, which we have looked at here. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged.Now is your chance to entertain yourself with these quick crosswords from the Guardian's extensive archives, with the first book in the new Guardian puzzle book series. In it, I tell the story behind the development of each crossword: how I thought of the theme, the ideas that didn’t made it into print and the unlikely connections that emerged afterwards. An image of seaside rock no doubt entered my subconscious, because two puzzles about types of rock emerged much later. A solicitor, he worked at Lincoln’s Inn and enjoyed writing amid the “hustle and bustle” of his commute. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.