Schadenfreude (John Harrington, 1944 - 2019)

In early March the death was announced of John Harrington, the setter Schadenfreude whose engaging puzzles have challenged solvers since 1998. His puzzles have appeared in a number of publications, including The Listener and the Cambridge Alumni magazine CAM. Born in 1944, he described his life, in the A to Z of Crosswords, as “largely reclusive", spending most of his time "walking the footpaths, setting more crosswords and keeping an extensive garden under some sort of control”. 

I only recently came upon several of his fiendish puzzles when they appeared at the back of the quarterly issues of CAM. His most recent (and perhaps final) puzzle was entitled "No Show". The solver was required to enter the answers to the clues into a 13 x 13 barred grid so that a total of 19 unspecified cells remained empty. When this stage was complete, the empty cells had to be filled in to reveal "thematic members", the only faint clue as to the theme being the title. Finally, the unknown "titular character" had to be traced out in the completed grid using a knight's tour, in such a way that when the letters in the cells visited on the tour were removed, all the final grid entries, ignoring spaces, were genuine words. Seeing my struggle would have more than justified his choice of setter's name.  RIP Schadenfreude.