I have performed two different editorial roles during my career: as co-editor of the Listener Crossword series, I ensured quality puzzles were published every week in The Times of London for over 12 years; I have also been involved in projects to create new crossword reference books.
The Listener Crossword is famous as the most difficult crossword puzzle series in the English language. Editing the puzzles is a role that might have been made for me: I started solving Listener Crosswords the late 70s, when I was in my late teens. I was the best solver in the 1989-1990 year and subsequently set a record by solving a sequence of 224 puzzles correctly from 1989 onwards.
With this record, I was a very strong candidate to fill the editorial vacancy that opened up in 1994. I accepted the role, initially working as the first vetter, dealing with all the submissions from constructors and preparing a shortlist of revised puzzles to be tried by the second vetter, Michael Rich.
One of my aims as an editor was to reduce
the number of errors on publication, in grids as well as clues: I started
providing grid artwork for scanning from 1994 onwards – this put a stop
to a frustrating source of errors immediately. Later the text of preamble and
clues was submitted electronically for publication and this dramatically
reduced the need to correct keying errors at the proof stage.
In 2002, Michael Rich passed away suddenly and I steered the series through this difficult time, assuming the second vetter's role and inviting Derek Arthur to become the first vetter. Working as the second vetter, there were fewer puzzles to solve, but I had the additional responsibilities of scheduling puzzles, sending them for publication in The Times of London and checking faxed proofs.
Also in 2002, I edited Listener Crossword Book 1, the first compilation of Listener puzzles from The Times of London. This involved selecting 60 of the best Listener crosswords from 1991 to 1995, deciding the order and preparing a word processing file of the crosswords, complete with grid artwork.
In 2005, I decided to step down as editor in order to focus more on my other activities.
In 2005-2006, I worked on a major new edition of the Chambers Crossword Dictionary. This is a "reverse" dictionary, in which the headwords are those keywords you might find in a clue: these lead you to what the clue answer might be. For example, if you have "see" in a clue, you can find its headword, leading you to options such as C, lo, Ely, look, etc. My role as co-editor was to augment the list of headwords being covered, and extract the possible answers, using my extensive knowledge of cryptic cluing practice to go beyond simple synonyms.
Earlier in 2005, I worked as an editorial consultant on XWD: A Dictionary of Crossword Abbreviations. This was a new crossword reference giving a comprehensive list of the abbreviations used in British cryptic crosswords. Crossword solvers can use it to discover what abbreviations a word in a clue might indicate (eg "Germany" could lead to D or GER). Crossword constructors use it to find how to clue specific letter sequences (eg SD could be clued by "sine die", "South Dakota", "Swaziland" or "without date").
In 2011, I developed the first of a series of electronic books utilizing the database of words and phrases from TEA and Sympathy. The Crossword Man Book of Anagrams for Kindle devices includes 250,000 solutions to anagrams, organized by word length and alphagram; an alphagram index for each word length gets you within a few pages of the answer you're looking for.
