The notes on your 96th puzzle include the unlikely phrase “This is the last fish-based puzzle in this collection”.

The world of Harriet and Lord Peter may be long gone (can you even still pick up a “pocket edition of Tristram Shandy” to enjoy with your picnic?

It’s a quick-crossword version of Victor Meldrew’s attempt to solve a baffling cryptic, which we have looked at here.

Lord Peter is fond of a puzzle too; as is often the case in whodunnits, being a solver of crosswords is handy when you are trying to solve a murder. But everyone should, of course, read The Giant Jam Sandwich, along with John’s other books, including his illustrations to the works of Edward Lear and James Joyce. I'd like to get a crossword puzzle book for my boyfriend for Christmas: he often does the guardian crossword/ enjoys word puzzles in general. In the meantime, our next book is The Twelve Quizzes of Christmas by Frank Paul, which we’ll discuss in November. Incredibly, Sayers tells us in a footnote that she has omitted a part of the conversation about whether RBEXMG might represent a date in a certain format “for brevity’s sake”.You’ll discover something of my working methods and the lively relationship between setter and editor, you’ll have another chance to solve extra teaser clues and you’ll hear from the solvers who took the time to comment on the puzzles when they were first published. 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. When at last we find the important coded message in Have His Carcase, Lord Peter Wimsey delegates the decoding to the whodunnit novelist with whom he has spent much of the story flirting. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.