Just to let you know that Hungarian urban legend blogger Ivan Marinov emailed me an update on his search for the full story behind the 1926 Budapest crossword suicide case.
Ivan had, as promised, gone through the archives of various Hungarian police journals for 1926 (though the Rendőrségi Lapok-nak archive for the whole of 1926 turned out to be missing), but unfortunately without any great success. The only short article he did find was that (as I understand it) even though detectives had worked feverishly on the case for a month, they hadn’t been able to solve it: but the writer felt (somewhat downheartedly, it has to be said) that suicide had become so commonplace by then that it took attaching a crossword to one to make it noteworthy. And wasn’t it terribly sad that some people found it more interesting to make up a puzzle and die than to live?
However, this isn’t (quite) the end of the line: for example, it may well be that a Hungarian crossword history collector has a copy of this in a dusty file somewhere – or perhaps the Rendőrségi Lapok-nak 1926 archive will turn up in a completely different location. Hopefully we shall see! 🙂