Orlando (Michael Curl) obituary

Michael Curl, who has died aged 77, brought crosswords into the online world. As Orlando, he set hundreds of elegantly clued Guardian puzzles over 45 years. He was until recently one of the three setters behind the Guardian’s beloved quicks, but was by no means restricted to these pages.

One of the few to (eventually) make crosswords a full-time business, he was Cincinnus in the Financial Times, operated anonymously at the Times and, to use the local term, constructed under his own name for the Los Angeles Times. His puzzles appeared in English-language papers in Costa Rica, Turkey and Thailand, but the location his clues most often addressed was the north of England.

Early in 1997 he wrote to my predecessor as crossword editor, Hugh Stephenson, asking: “Are there any plans for putting the Guardian crossword on the internet?” It took another couple of years for that to happen; in the meantime, Michael began building his own online puzzling resources and wondering what possibilities were opening up in the new medium.

Born in South Shields, Tyne and wear, Michael was the son of Roland Curl, a bricklayer, and his wife, Theresa (nee Dermody). That marriage was soon dissolved; Michael grew up with his mother and stepfather. He took O-levels at a Catholic school, St Aidan’s grammar, in Sunderland, and compensated for his education stopping there with a lifetime of private learning.

In 2012, he told me that he imagined a solver who is “moderately well educated”; to Michael this meant a familiarity with the names of the composers Delibes, Poulenc and Scriabin and the Dickens characters Micawber, Heep and Peggotty.

His early working life included stints as a bus conductor and a librarian in Sunderland and a clerk at Vauxhall Motors. He met Mary Barnard through the Youth Hostels Association; they married in 1970 and had three children: David, Edward and Rachel.

Michael’s longest stretch as an employee was in software engineering for Unilever. He saw this as a way of subsidising his passion for puzzles: he was in the habit of buying the Guardian on the way to work and tackling its cryptic over lunch, developing what he described as a reverence for Araucaria – though Michael’s clues would notably display much more of one of cryptics’ traditional values: precision.

He practised his craft and in 1974 sent a pair of puzzles to the Guardian’s crossword editor, John Perkin, who liked them. A near-anagram of Michael’s middle name, Roland, brought the name Orlando to the paper’s back pages. This led to commissions for other publications: enough that he often worked until 2am with strong black coffee. Mary and Rachel recall with fondness “a whole internal world that family and friends were not always privy to”.

Over two years, he went through Chambers dictionary three times, checking each entry for possible anagrams, which made possible his 1982 book The Anagram Dictionary. He was a careful, precise man, and it was Michael’s handwriting that appeared in the solutions for Araucaria’s wild bank holiday specials that could not be produced by machine.

By 2000 the side job was solid enough that Michael was able to take early retirement from the day job. He assembled a website for American solvers, built an audience, then sold it to a US media corporation. He assembled Best for Puzzles, a reference work about British crosswords and setters that many have come to rely on. It allowed solvers, often for the first time, to put names to pseudonyms and to realise that, say, the FT’s Cincinnus might be the same person as the Guardian’s Orlando.

More importantly, though, retirement meant that Michael was able to compile puzzles far and wide. His favourite home remained his first, and this paper’s other setters have rushed to mention Orlando whenever I have asked them to name the peers they most respect. Away from puzzles he was gentle, modest and dedicated to his family (and to birdwatching).

While the whole world was present in Orlando clues, Michael’s puzzles for the Dalesman magazine were more tightly focused and are collected in eight volumes since 2002 of the Yorkshire Crossword Book, subtitled Sixty Puzzles Featuring England’s Greatest County.

Michael did not live to see the innovations that he imagined might be made possible by puzzles appearing online. “Just think what could be done,” he wondered, “with crosswords incorporating hyperlinks, sound, pictures, video and so on.” He suspected, though, that there was no demand for “bells and whistles”; he was probably right.

When he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Michael noted two ironies. One was that his other great pleasure was good food; the other was that the same diagnosis had been given, 11 years ago, to Araucaria.

Two clues representative of Orlando’s impeccable style are “A northern city shows excessive affection for tales (9)” and “Title recollected by Beatles enthusiasts, primarily (3,2,2)”. Answers below.

When we assembled the numbers in 2023 of who had compiled what for the Guardian, despite a necessarily slower start than most, Michael was our 10th most prolific cryptic setter. Those figures do not include the countless quicks – and the Guardian crossword archive contains all his puzzles since 1999, when we eventually followed Michael on to the web.

He is survived by Mary and their children, two grandchildren, Meg and Sam, and a great-grandson, Ralph.

• Orlando (Michael Roland Curl), crossword setter, born 16 September 1946; died 5 July 2024

• The answers to the clues above are ANECDOTES and LET IT BE