The Guardian Quick Crosswords 1: A collection of more than 200 entertaining puzzles (Guardian Puzzle Books)

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More fool the adapters: the conversation could only have been more delightful if our heroes had digressed into discussing Playfair’s creator, Charles Wheatstone, who also found time to invent the English concertina and an electronic device that went on to be a key aspect of Scientology.

The Guardian is an award-winning British newspaper that consistently rates as the most-trusted newspaper in the country.

The same year, 1939, is pretty much officially the end of the Golden Age of mystery stories, and the year of publication of The Big Sleep, anyone’s go-to rowdier novel. As addictively enjoyable as they are compulsively difficult, get ready for hours of fun with these high-quality puzzles.

Happily for us, Playfair codes are not uncrackable, which means that we later get an entire chapter in which Harriet and Lord Peter pore over sections of a Playfair grid. There’s something oddly organic about Grid 61, which I think of as having a black twig across the middle of the grid, and I like all the grids that make geometric shapes. A solicitor, he worked at Lincoln’s Inn and enjoyed writing amid the “hustle and bustle” of his commute.At the Observer, Ximenes took over from Torquemada and applied discipline (“playing the game”) to assist the solver. 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. Since those characters are either irredeemably sadistic or hopelessly foolish, the reader needs to be in the right mood.

And that makes them ideal for decoding that message, since it has been created using a Playfair code. In the meantime, our next tome is a collection of thoughts about puzzles, along with the puzzles themselves. I do have a favourite pen: the Pilot G-Tec-C4, which makes an accurate line and allows for ludicrously small writing.

Photograph: Farooq Khan/EPA-EFE View image in fullscreen Navigating the waters … a boatman on the Dal Lake in Srinagar. 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. I’ve kept notes for unrelated clue ideas in an old Filofax – the oldest date back more than 20 years – but I move to my laptop as soon as I have an idea for a theme. Grids 54A and 54B (the ones with the Ss) have a preponderance of shorter lights, which matches the type of words that I like to clue, as does Grid 58 (the one with the Ws). It’s a quick-crossword version of Victor Meldrew’s attempt to solve a baffling cryptic, which we have looked at here.