Sunday Times 4584

[ossian]

Folks,

5d. (6) n?e?e? Missing, as was masseur reportedly. Is this needed or needed. I only very occasionally complete one of Mr. Meyer's crosswords and I don't want to muck this one up. A case can be made for either. Any advice would be appreciated.

Many Thanks,

ossian

[anaxcrosswords]

Richard Rogan, recently appointed as Times crossword editor (Independent puzzle solvers will know him as Bannsider), is a master of these sneakily presented definitions. This discussion has reminded me – although perhaps the principle is very slightly different – of a superb example he wrote a few years ago. I can’t remember the full clue but the answer was MONROVIA, and I think it may have gone something like:
What cows go through circling near Liberian capital (8)
In cryptic shorthand the wordplay breakdown is MOO VIA around NR, and the brilliant piece of trickery is defining MOO as ‘what cows go’.
I suppose the point I’m trying to make, albeit clumsily, is that part of the joy of cryptics is finding (as a setter) or working out (as a solver) examples like this. We’re not arguing that they’re 100% fair/accurate, but by jiminy they’re fun when you spot them.

[factor-fiction]

I'm perfectly happy with the "what cows go=MOO" example.
Maybe any problems with this could have been overcome by saying "masseur's client"

[Baldric]

It's^^^^^ like "War and Peace"

;-)

[factor-fiction]

I've moved on, Baldric- back to Crosswords section.

[ossian]

Thanks ana. I still think that this clue lacks, what all compilers should strive for, elegance.

ossian

[anaxcrosswords]

That’s OK, Ossian, I can live with that. Elegance certainly is something we strive for, although we can’t always be as elegant as we’d like – simple fact is, some words just don’t lend themselves to it particularly well. Boring technical stuff follows, but I hope it offers a little insight:
The nature of an individual clue depends on a few things. The intended overall difficulty of the puzzle, the difficulty of clues whose answers cross-check the one we’re working on, how common/obscure the answer is and, finally, what the unchecked letters are. Let’s imagine, for example, you’d solved all the clues intersecting this one and that gave you S-A-E-. There are masses of potential answers here, so the idea would be to make the clue pretty straightforward. R-Y-H- is different; only one obvious candidate, so we can get a bit trickier if we like, provided that clues to the crossing answers aren’t too tough.
For this answer, the intersecting clues are moderate, the answer itself a very common word, and there are few alternatives. So the clue can be bit harder, but it’s a ‘relaxing’ Sunday puzzle so let’s not go overboard.
So as you can see I’ve narrowed down the approaches I can take, but I’m also faced with a not particularly friendly bunch of letters. I’d love the resulting clue to be concise and elegant, but in the end I’ve had to settle for more of the former than the latter.