Our Summer Reading series continues this week with a deep dive into classic and modern murder mysteries and how they’ve shaped and been shaped by puzzly design!
This week, join me as I explore The Murder Game: Play, Puzzles and the Golden Age by John Curran.
From the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers through to the modern day, mystery writers have been engaged in an unspoken game with their readers. As A.E.W. Mason put it:
The author’s aim is to keep the reader guessing, where the puzzle, the whole puzzle, and nothing but the puzzle is his intention, the crime is discovered in the first chapter and thereabouts, the circumstances are made conventional so as not to distract the reader from the riddle; and the characters one after the other are shown to be all so obviously suspect or all so obviously innocent that no one shall be able to spot the criminal until in his last words the author hands him over to the police.
The puzzle plot, as some call the elaborate web woven by mystery writers, has evolved over the decades. Their rules have changed and grown better defined, authors have included maps and floor plans to aid readers in unraveling the mystery, and the game continues.
… some readers find the same satisfaction in detection that they find in doing a demanding crossword puzzle… You are competing with an adversary who cannot possibly cheat you, and need never outwit you, because his statement is frozen on the paper and he cannot, as he would in, say, a game of chess, adjust his strategy to yours. — Erik Routley
The Murder Game explores the origins of the puzzle plot, offering examples of its earliest iterations and the many, many forms it has taken across thousands of novels since. Curran’s voluminous knowledge of not only the Golden Age of mystery writing, but the present day as well, is truly impressive, and you feel like you’re being escorted through the puzzle plot’s development step by step.
It was great fun to read through the increasing complexity of the mysteries presented across decades, as well as the challenge involved in creating genuinely satisfying locked-room mysteries and “impossible” crimes. The transition from whodunit to howdunit was fascinating!
Despite the numerous examples of various tropes and techniques, Curran never lost sight of how puzzle-solving and mystery-solving go hand-in-hand. He shared examples of how puzzles have helped evolve mystery writing in exciting new directions — jigsaw mysteries, mapbooks, Cain’s Jawbone — all while remaining distinctly separate in important ways.
He even offered a delightful interlude with Clue/Cluedo as both base template and tongue-in-cheek reflection of murder mystery stories, complete with lists of similar suspects, scenarios, and locations from throughout the genre’s history.
Whether you’re a puzzle fan or a devotee of murder mysteries, The Murder Game is an engrossing, enjoyable read that feels like an in-depth study delivered by a trusted friend. It’s literary history, gaming insight, and an exhaustive exploration of the tropes, tricks, and quirks of the genre, all steeped in the attention to detail that can only come from a diehard fan.
Are you doing any reading this summer, puzzly or otherwise, fellow reader? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
In November of last year, I wrote about the most recent class of toys and games accepted into the Hall of Fame. I enjoy seeing which puzzles and games are nominated, and occasionally accepted, as representative of iconic parts of our collective childhood and the spirit of play in general.
Battleship, slime, and Trivial Pursuit were the newest inductees into the Hall of Fame, and good for them, they’re all worthy nominees.
But I was appalled, APPALLED I TELL YOU, that snow was snubbed for acceptance into the National Toy Hall of Fame.
I mean, snow should have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer day one.
It’s a fundamental item of play for many children. Throwing snowballs. Building snowmen and other snowfolk. Catching snowflakes on your tongue. Sledding.
And people of any age can enjoy.
Plus it’s free. It falls from the sky and anyone in the proper climate can play with it. There’s no cost to play, no entry fee to enjoy.
Look a snowdecahedron! You can’t make dice out of slime. THEY WOULDN’T ROLL. THEY WOULDN’T ROLL, YOU FOOL!
Not only that, but snow literally creates opportunities to play with it. Ever heard of snow days? You betcha. Snow falls from the sky and creates days free of school and other responsibilities so children can go play.
Trivial Pursuit can’t do that! Trivial Pursuit falls from the sky, you just have a lot to clean up. No free day for Trivial Pursuit-ing.
So, I beseech you, trustees of the National Toy Hall of Fame, as well as your associated pals at the Strong Museum of Play…
Do the right thing. Let’s get snow back on the ballot and into the HoF where it belongs.
Fellow reader, will you join me on this worthwhile endeavor?
It’s the perfect time to vote for snow, because it’s summer in America right now and you’re liable to be more nostalgic for it.
(You don’t have to nominate snow. There might be a toy you think is more deserving, and that’s totally fair. It doesn’t have to be snow. It’s not like I’ll know you clicked the button and wrote something else in. I won’t. But I will somehow sense it and be a little disappointed, I’m not gonna lie.)
#JusticeForSnow
(Please note that this is not the same as #JustIceForSnow. That’s bad. Don’t put ice in your snowballs. You’ll hurt somebody like that. Not cool, man. Not cool. There’s a reason I’m not advocating for ice in the HoF.)
After two SummerReads that were peripherally about crosswords, it felt appropriate to finally read something definitively about crosswords.
So join me as Natan Last takes on a journey, exploring where crosswords have been, where they are now, and hopefully where they’re going in Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle.
The history of crosswords is peculiar, because the medium itself has ebbs and flows, moments of great cultural prominence and others where it fades into the background of daily life.
And since the crossword is ever-evolving, shaped by new editors, new outlets, and new constructors, the history of crosswords is constantly being reexamined and recontextualized by fresh eyes and previously-unheard perspectives.
Last deftly moves between the past and the present as he chronicles the rich cultural impact (and more importantly, the potential for GREATER cultural impact) of crosswords. There are chapters dedicated to the intersection of crosswords and art, crosswords and technology, and crosswords and identity.
We learn about the rise of Dr.Fill and what makes crosswords unlike other activities like Chess and Go that have been challenged by automated play. We learn about the New Wave of crosswords (which seems quaint at this point) and the current indie revolution that shapes the modern puzzle experience.
We learn about cruciverbalists past and present like Elizabeth Gorski and Mangesh Ghogre, exploring the complex relationship between crosswords, culture, and representation, especially how crosswords have both helped and hindered at points.
Each chapter is a thought-provoking short essay, enhanced by Last’s proficiency as a storyteller. He spins a wonderful narrative, charming and patient, knowing exactly when to deep dive on a subject and when to pivot to a meaningful counterpoint.
And along the way, we get delightful backstory on surprising moments, important voices, and Natan’s firsthand experience in the world of crosswords.
There are a fair number of books that explore crossword history, and what makes each of them worthwhile isn’t the factual information, it’s the perspective offered by the author. And Last takes a fun, if well-trodden topic, and he makes it hum with context, commentary, and an unflinching look at the good and the not-so-good of crosswords past and present.
I had high expectations coming into this book, and Across the Universe met and exceeded every single one. This belongs on any crossword fan’s shelf.
Are you doing any reading this summer, puzzly or otherwise, fellow reader? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
It was disappointingly hard to find an image for the 250th anniversary or the Fourth of July that didn’t make me want to puke, so here you go, a map of America without the idiotic “Gulf of America” crap on it…
I confess, fellow puzzler, when I was planning ahead for July’s posts, I struggled with what to write for today. I didn’t feel inspired to create a puzzle around the anniversary, and for reasons political, moral, and also quite personal, I didn’t exactly feel in a celebratory mood when I thought of the 4th.
So I instead cast my mind back to the bicentennial, researching events and celebrations held for the 200th anniversary of the country, hoping for inspiration to strike.
And I fell down a rabbit hole when exploring the subject of time capsules.
Time capsule plaque in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which actually includes the word “sesquicentennial”…
Did you know that time capsules go missing with surprising regularity?
A time capsule was buried in the 1950s at the San Francisco International Airport. It was lost, and then rediscovered during construction in the 1970s. It was lost AGAIN, and then rediscovered again in the 1990s, close to the original intended year of the time capsule’s reopening in 2000. Serendipity.
In my perusings, a single line caught my attention:
And nestled among 150 items in the Chicago City Bank and Trust Company’s sealed-and-locked-away “Time Capsule 1976-2076” is a crossword puzzle
A crossword included in a hundred-year time capsule? One that would be halfway through its journey to the future on July 4, 2026?
I wondered what crossword was chosen to represent the world at the time.
So I immediately went on the hunt for more information.
First, I wanted to establish that the time capsule’s location was still currently known. After reading about all those lost and misplaced ones, this felt like the prudent place to start.
With the assistance of Annika Kohrt, Public Services Librarian at the Chicago History Museum, I found the location of the original bank in question at 815 West 63rd Street, Chicago.
The building is now a Chicago Landmark, as well as the home of the Englewood branch of US Bank. After talking to several very helpful and probably confused bank employees about the time capsule, I spoke to the bank manager, Tiffany, who kindly confirmed that the time capsule is intact in the bank’s vault.
I couldn’t ask for further details without sounding like I was plotting a heist, so I tabled my inquiry there.
So the time capsule still exists. Excellent!
Annika also provided me with some newspaper articles about the time capsule — librarians are the BEST, seriously — which indicated that a copy of The Chicago Defender newspaper was included in the time capsule.
The Chicago Defender is a remarkable institution.
This weekly African-American newspaper was founded in 1905, reporting on important issues of the day, railing against Jim Crow laws and segregation practices. Langston Hughes, Ida B. Wells, and Gwendolyn Brooks were among the important voices who wrote for the Defender over the years.
It became a daily newspaper in 1956, serving as a crucial voice during the Civil Rights Movement, and wouldn’t return to its weekly format for over 50 years. It is still publishing to this day in online format.
By the time the bicentennial rolled around, the Defender had celebrated 70 years as one of the most influential and outspoken periodicals in the country.
And, in fact, two different issues were included in the time capsule: the 70th anniversary edition of the Chicago Defender and the 1976 Bicentennial edition of the Chicago Defender.
With the assistance of Tony, one of the Ask a Librarian pros from the Chicago Public Library, I learned quite a bit about the Defender.
Including the fact that the Defender didn’t have a regular puzzle section in the paper.
I was barking up the wrong tree.
I was not deterred, though. With the deft help of capable researchers like Annika and Tony — I swear, the Internet is borderline unsearchable at this point, thank ALL the gods for librarians — I had confirmed the time capsule’s location, current status, and some of its contents.
So I started poring through newspaper archives and articles related to “Time Capsule 1976-2076.”
And as you might expect, Midwest newspapers gave quite a bit of coverage to the time capsule. Citizens had months to suggest items to place inside. Those items were then on display for the public to enjoy, before being sealed away that December to await the citizens of Chicago in 2076.
Items inside included:
a letter penned by the late Mayor Daley to the people of 2076
a sheet of Chicago Bears 1976 season tickets
documents from Englewood Hospital and other crucial public services
half-hour recordings of radio shows about the time capsule’s creation
albums from Johnny Mathis (“I Only Have Eyes For You”) and Sammy Davis Jr. (“Now,” featuring “Candy Man”).
Items cataloguing Chicago’s history past and present, as well as recipes, magazines, and books recounting the histories of various industries and cultural institutions, were also included to provide a snapshot of life at the time.
And among all those items, I finally spotted the item that had thus far eluded me in my historical deep dive into the time capsule:
“Dell Publishing Company – Crossword Puzzles, December, 1976.”
Unfortunately, not the issue in question, but one from the same year. Look at that disconnected grid. *shakes head*
I’ve reached out to my friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles to see if a copy of this magazine is in their archives. If so, I’ll update this post and let you know!
Oh, one more thing.
In my research, I finally found the full article containing the brief snippet that inspired this post, and I discovered a word had been cut off in the original scan.
The text actually read:
And nestled among 150 items in the Chicago City Bank and Trust Company’s sealed-and-locked-away “Time Capsule 1976-2076” is a crossword puzzle magazine.
A single word could’ve changed my entire approach.
But then again, there’s so much I wouldn’t have learned if that word had been part of my original game plan, so I don’t regret the journey.
Fifty years from today, the citizens of 2076 Chicago will be celebrating the tricentennial with, among many other symbols of times gone by, a puzzle magazine that is still being published today, and hopefully one that will still be publishing fifty years from now.
Those folks will probably never read these words.
But I want to thank them anyway.
I want to thank the people who put together that time capsule, and the people who will be opening it, for putting a little bit of feeling back into this particular July 4th for me.
On May 6th, The Guardian published their 30,000th cryptic puzzle, which was set by one of the most celebrated voices in cryptic puzzles, Arachne. Crossword editor Alan Connor called the cryptic puzzle “a perfect little enigma.”
Now, that would have been milestone enough, but as it turns out, the setters of The Guardian had something much more elaborate in store for their loyal solvers: a treasure hunt spanning MANY cryptics.
They’d started two years beforehand.
Back in 2024, they began brainstorming something special for Cryptic #30,000.
A few months later, a series of entries began appearing in the bottom row of particular cryptics. Entries like WELL DONE, BRAVO, and HERE were intended to draw the eye of attentive puzzle fans. (This would prove helpful later for people searching back through the puzzle archives, once they’d learned about the treasure hunt.)
But the creative team were careful going forward, utilizing only chunks of words (ISOURF, INALCH, ALLENG) and not full entries. I can imagine the confusion for those keen-eyed solvers who were already on the trail when the pattern suddenly changed.
This continued throughout 2025 with solvers none the wiser.
The treasure hunt began in earnest when cryptic #30,000 was published.
In cryptic #30,000, Arachne included the phrases PERIMETER TODAY and QUICK CROSSWORD reading out in the grid. (The Quick Crossword accompanies the daily cryptic in The Guardian.) Solvers who then completed the Quick Crossword would then find the following message reading out clockwise on the perimeter of the grid:
LEADER I TAILORED BADLY
A cryptic clue was hidden in the perimeter letters!
Arachne had also included the word ACROSTIC in Cryptic #30,000 as a subliminal hint to solvers for where to look in the editorial that day.
And if you read the first letter of each paragraph in Connor’s editorial, you get the message LAST THIRTY-FIVE PRIMES.
No, wait, wrong Prime…
Diabolical work. That was the pattern to follow in order to uncover which puzzles were part of their long-running secret message, indicating the actual cryptic puzzle numbers to search through, starting with #29581 and ending with #29989.
So what was the message? What was the final result of a year and a half of seeding and sneaking and devious wordplay?
Well done, bravo, here in conclusion is our final challenge. Are you keeping up? Great, there will be a wonderful prize but first you must enter a race. Not an actual athletic race of course, that would be weird. Not that. It’s a cerebral race in the form of a crossword puzzle. It’s a Genius published at noon BST tomorrow. Godspeed!
Naturally, when the hour arrived, a Genius crossword appeared, set by the one and only Enigmatist, another beloved name in the field of cryptics.
Duncan over at Fifteen Squared did an amazing breakdown of not just the treasure hunt but the puzzle that awaited solvers at the end, and it is a mind-bending bit of puzzling.
To start, there were no answer length at the end of each clue, which is definitely a break with tradition when it comes to cryptic crosswords. And that’s for a good reason.
Solvers had to add a letter to many of the answers in order to form the words RECKON, DEDUCE, REASON, and IDEATE beyond the boundaries of the grid.
Yes, they had to think outside the box.
Many of the answers referred to luminaries in their various fields (EINSTEIN, ESCHER, LEONARDO, MANDELA, WATSON, CERVANTES, etc.), making the Genius crossword rather literal.
The first letter of every clue ALSO had something to hide. When you removed the names of two more geniuses reading out acrostic-style, BEETHOVEN and ARAUCARIA (yet another beloved cryptic setter), you get the message IT IS WHAT GENIUSES DO.
Which ties back to thinking outside the box.
Wow. What a puzzle.
So, did the puzzle live up to the hype after ALL of this amazing build-up?
I’ve finally followed the rabbit-hole all the way to the bottom and… wow. Just blown away by the whole thing, to the point of tears at the final mic-drop.
It’s as if a dedicated team of clever people co-ordinated in secret for a year and a half to deliver something that felt like it was designed just for me (and possibly you, if you’re here). Gorgeous, beautiful work.
WELL DONE and BRAVO, Guardian editors and setters and contributors. What an amazing gift to offer your solvers.
Good luck topping this one when you get to the next 30,000 puzzle goal line!
Are you a cryptic solver, fellow puzzler? Would you have been unable to unravel The Guardian’s crafty clues and hidden hints? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
Just a quick bonus post on this day, the Mother’s Dayest of all days, to spread the word about a delightful puzzly program that will be debuting on Netflix tomorrow.
It’s called The Puzzle Room With David Kwong, and it’s a video podcast series. If you don’t know David, boy, you are missing out. He’s a crossword constructor, magician, and all-around expert in baffling people with both words and visuals.
He’s consulted on film and TV projects like Blindspot, Now You See Me, and The Imitation Game, and he’s previously combined magic and puzzles for his touring show, The Enigmatist.
Now he’s bringing his linguistic legerdemain and impressive works of mentalism to one of the world’s biggest streaming services.
Sometimes solving a challenging puzzle can feel like magic. That moment when the final piece clicks into place. The gasp before you lock in your answer. After all that time sweating, you finally feel like the smartest person in the room.
In the new video podcast series The Puzzle Room with David Kwong launching on May 11, every episode promises plenty of satisfying aha moments. The renowned magician, mentalist, and New York Times crossword constructor personalizes each puzzle for a pair of celebrity guests, leading to plenty of unexpected epiphanies and clues.
“We’re in a golden age of puzzles and games, and Netflix is the perfect home for viewers to stretch their brains with The Puzzle Room,” says Kwong. “From the intense strategy of Squid Game and the surprising twists of Knives Out, to the daily challenges of Netflix Puzzled and Best Guess Live, Netflix has long been the destination for smart entertainment. Get ready to put on your thinking caps, everyone! I can’t wait to puzzle with you all.”
Produced by Pod People, the series is designed in a way that viewers at home can play along, guests and fans face off in a race to see who can answer first. As the episode unfolds, the puzzles gradually increase in difficulty, with Kwong encouraging and celebrating every breakthrough. Each episode ends with a moment of mentalism or head-scratching illusions.
PuzzCulture 