New York Times, Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Some bio: I am a newspaper editor in Detroit. I have had some mystery short stories published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, where I was once the managing editor many, many years ago. I recently had my first play, "Clutter," produced at Theatre Nova in Ann Arbor, and I am the artistic director of a small theatre company called Pencilpoint Theatreworks here in Ypsilanti. Ann Arbor constructors James Tuttle and Peter Collins are local celebrities in my mind.

My puzzle went through three revisions over the course of a year. Will was incredibly patient with me as I worked through refining the theme answers and the fill. This was the sixth puzzle I had submitted for Will's consideration so you can see I'm a slow learner. This particular theme came to me as I recalled days when my son was very young, and he went through a period when he was delighted with "Knock Knock" jokes. We would spend time before bed making different ones up. I thought combining knock-knock jokes with a crossword would make an interesting hybrid.

One theme answer that didn't work for Will that I thought was funny was the classic, "Hutch who?" with the response being "gesundheit." He wanted the responses to be complete sentences, which is the better idea, but I shed a few tears letting "gesundheit" go.

Debut! And such a fun idea, a take on knock knock jokes. I enjoyed the puns, a surprise given that I'm sick of knock knock jokes (my two-year old constantly says "Interrupting cow MOO!"). My favorite was Sadie MAGIC WORD — "say the MAGIC WORD" — but the rest of them worked pretty well for me, too. I especially appreciated the multi-syllabic names, "Is there" punned upon as "Esther." "I want" as "Yvonne" was more of a stretch, but good puns are supposed to bad. Or something like that.

Love the audacity of a debut grid packed with six themers. Sometimes it's easier to work with six themers instead of five, as a longish (9+ letters) middle themer can create all sorts of problems.

Here, Brian does well to stack themers, WHOS THERE atop ANYONE HOME and I GET AN AMEN atop MA NO HANDS. This makes it more like you're working with four themers instead of six. As long as the overlapping letter pairs are friendly, this can make a constructor's life so much easier (vs. placing themers in every other row).

Brian had some flexibility in swapping themers, and he wisely paired up phrases resulting in such easy letter doublets like HA, EN, RY, EO at the top. The only one that's even remotely tricky is ??EO, but CLEO works fine there.

I'm usually happy to not notice short fill — its job is largely to stay out of the way — but TAXID is awfully nice. So hard to parse it into TAX ID.

HOB isn't as nice. Nor MLLES (although part of me does admire that crazy MLL beginning). Or ABED. But that's awfully good work from a debut constructor, especially considering the high theme density.

I would personally go out of my way to avoid ENSLAVE, as I prefer my crosswords to be uplifting, but to each his/her own.

Strong debut. I would have loved it if KNOCK KNOCK had been the first themer and WHOS THERE the second. Would also have been perfect if the themers had all related to knocking — [Esther] ANYONE HOME made for such an appropriate pun.