Alys Cummings Turns Cryptic Crosswords into Crime Fiction

Alys Cummings published her debut crime novel, Murder Most Cryptic, in October, and each of its 74 chapters opens with a cryptic crossword clue whose answer is hidden somewhere in the chapter's text.

Cummings belongs to a lineage of crime writers drawn to puzzles: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers worked the same territory, and television's Inspector Morse and Inside No 9 have mined it too. Both forms, Cummings argues, rest on an unspoken contract between creator and reader: enough information will be given, but the reader must assemble it.

"In the same way as when a setter is setting a puzzle for a solver, there are rules you should abide by," Cummings said. "There's that Afrit quote [about cryptic cluing]: 'I need not mean what I say, but I must say what I mean'. It's the same for a murder mystery."

How do red herrings work in both forms?

Cummings equates the red herring with the surface reading of a cryptic clue. "Red herrings are the same as a surface reading [of a clue] … where you know something isn't quite what it appears to be at first," she said. "The setter is putting red herrings in their clues in the same way that a writer of murder mysteries is putting red herrings into their book. It still has to be fair and it has to be there … in plain sight, so that once you get to the end you can see the clues that were laid."

The full crosswords appear in the book's appendix, so readers can solve them after finishing the story. Cummings cites this as her favourite clue, with the solution revealed at the end of this article:

Upside-down cakes on the rack (8)

What does the book change for its author?

A broken leg started it. Cummings began writing after she had to wear a cast for two months. "I wasn't particularly thinking, I'm going to get published one day," she said. "I was writing it for me and for my own pleasure. I love murder mysteries and I love crosswords, and it seemed to me that those two things go pretty closely hand in hand. So I started with an idea about a man found dead with a crossword clue in his pocket to which the answer is MURDER – then I wrote the book to find out what happened."

The practical consequence: Cummings had never set a full crossword before the novel. After a masterclass with the setter Boatman, she now compiles crosswords for the Guardian under the name Garson and for the Independent as Penelope.

"Obviously I love solving, but I equally love setting now," she said. "And I think they're quite different things, in the same way that being a writer or a reader are different things. So I'm very grateful that I had that impetus to start doing it because now it's grown and blossomed into something that's quite an important part of my life."

The pen name Penelope honours the weaver of Greek myth. "She was a weaver and so smart in Greek myths, so the idea of weaving and creating things seemed a good analogy to me," Cummings said. She also noted the field's imbalance: "There are not as many female setters as there are males." Garson was her late father's name, chosen as a way of celebrating him.

A second book is underway. It will feature some of the same characters, more crosswords and new kinds of puzzles.

"They're having a little bit of a resurgence, puzzles and murder mysteries," Cummings said. "Especially when the world can be quite a difficult place, having something with an answer that you can solve and get a satisfactory conclusion to is pleasing."

Solution: The answer to Cummings' clue is STRESSED. "Cakes" indicates "desserts", which reversed — "upside-down" — becomes "stressed", a word that also describes someone "on the rack".