James Brydon wrote this clue for this month’s FT News Puzzle about the French economy minister’s steamy novel Fugue américaine:
Burn Molière plays about a writer of erotica (5,2,5) *
“Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the answer fit into the grid,” says James, whose puzzle under his FT handle of Buccaneer, is published today. “I was most sad to have to jettison any reference to that.”
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Nor could he work into the puzzle stories such as the BBC Today programme losing listeners, Belgium’s Luca Brecel wining the world snooker championship or Boris and Carrie Johnson expecting their third child.
But there was plenty of other material that did make the grid — led by the enthronement of a British king and including that Eurovision songfest. Not for the first time in the puzzle series, royal feuding makes an appearance, as does UK economic travails, the legal battles of a former US president and the controversies surrounding British government ministers.
“I’m very far from a news junkie, so I spent some time googling May’s news, trying to come up with as wide a list as possible of potential items,” Brydon says. “Tragic news stories don’t work well in crosswords, so I looked for moments of cultural interest, or the travails and pratfalls of the powerful which seemed ripe for satirical mention.”
Writing crossword clues consists of seeing the potential for wordplay ideas hidden in words, according to Brydon.
“Here, various newsy ideas emerged from the words which were used to fill the grid around the core thematic ideas. References to Elon Musk’s Starship project, Wills and Harry’s spats, the final series of Succession, or the furore over Year 6 SATs (which my daughter took this year), weren’t on my original list, but grew organically out of the letter combinations in the grid, allowing the news themes to populate as many clues and solutions as possible.”
The FT monthly news puzzle can be found on ft.com/crosswordapp
*Bruno Le Maire [anagram of Burn Molière]
