Andrew Chaikin author page

I loved crafting an Agatha Christie-style whodunit. A detective summoned to a lavish manor. Characters spanning the class divide (confined to their rooms, like many of us these days). And a priceless McGuffin, literally at the center of it all.

I loved making the grid symmetrical, with rooms arranged like a Clue board. (The diamond is hidden in a diamond-shaped room, in a diamond-shaped floor plan. The grid itself was a clue!)

And I love pushing the envelope of what a crossword can do! I'm grateful to Will for supporting it. I hope you enjoyed the journey.

My original version was more difficult: ELLEN, MINNIE, TIKI, etc. were clued normally — with no indication that they figured into the story. The solver needed to discover the names hidden in the rooms, unlocking the rest of the mystery. (I kept other first names out of the grid — a surprisingly challenging restriction!) But after extensive testing, Will and his team decided to indicate the suspects more overtly.

This puzzle took a hamlet: Mike Selinker, Alison Muratore, the whole Chaikin family, Debbie Goldstein, Jenny Gutbezahl, Rick Rubenstein, Sandor Weisz, and Dave Shukan all provided crucial feedback. And as always, the guidance of my crossword sensei Tyler Hinman was invaluable.

If you enjoyed this, please visit Puzzle Bouquet — our Mother's Day puzzle spectacular! We're raising $10,000 for safe maternity care for low-income moms in quarantine worldwide. Download our beautiful puzzle suite dedicated to moms, then hit Donate — and change the world.

The initial spark for this puzzle was LOSE TEN POUNDS, which didn't end up making the cut. My testers rightly noted that no British person, no matter how absent-minded or confused about gambling, would want to lose money.

Other resolutions on the cutting room floor: FIND A LIFE PARTNER (lonely board-gamer), CLEAN UP THE HOUSE (Congressional ethicist), START RUNNING (hesitant politician), DO SOME TRAVELING (brazen basketballer).

Making this puzzle took a village: Alison Muratore, Greg Pliska, Eric Chaikin, Debbie Goldstein, and NeilFred Picciotto all provided valuable feedback. And as always, my puzzle sensei Tyler Hinman generously evaluated many, many iterations of the filled grid — sparing the nation's solvers the indignity of answers like ONER, PLUR, RVER, EBOND, and so on.

Not coincidentally, these folks are all members of a wonderful, welcoming organization called the National Puzzlers' League. If you want to spend four days playing ingenious, hand-crafted word puzzles of all kinds, this year's convention is in Toronto in July!

I made it a priority to keep partials out of the grid, and crosswordese to a minimum. I broke up some lovely bonuses — PALESTINIAN, SEALTHEDEAL — to enable cleaner, shorter entries elsewhere. But that pile of ESAI ATTA SSR SRO etc. tells me I can still do better — and I'm sorry there aren't more famous MARCIs!

I also made it a priority to include as many women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks in the puzzle as possible — and I was glad to see that most of my efforts made it through the editing process. Representation in popular culture — including crosswords — can help create a more just, inclusive, loving world. May it be so in 2020.

I'm a musician (Kid Beyond) and meditation teacher; I moonlight in game and puzzle design. This idea came after a long day in the recording studio.

I liked the notion of cluing "21" with 21-letter phrases, allowing a meta-reference at the bottom. And I loved creating a grid with horizontal and vertical symmetry — it feels like Mexican tile art.

The first draft had a bunch of grand ideas — like running the puzzle on January 21, with "1/21" cluing DATE YOU ARE SOLVING THIS. Will gently told me all the problems this would cause... so out it went.

Another ambitious idea was to cram 21's throughout all the clues. I whipped up about 50 of them: references to Century 21, "21 Jump Street," the 21 Club, pop stars Twenty One Pilots and 21 Savage, etc. Most of these were too stretchy for Will, but he graciously kept a few.

This is my second puzzle for the Times. I remain humbled by how many hours go into making a good idea great — pushing for ever-better fill, redoing the whole grid over and over, trimming blocks down to the bare minimum...

Many thanks to puzzle sensei Tyler Hinman for all his tireless feedback, Jeff Chen for xwordinfo.com and his wonderful Word List, Antony Lewis for the indispensable Crossword Compiler, and of course Will for nurturing my work!

Hardcore puzzlers may note that this puzzle has only 126 entries, the lowest Sunday word count ever. Now that I've broken a world record, I won't have to take up competitive hot-dog eating! What a relief.

Last year, I was creating a game called "May Own A's," for the 57th Equinox word-game party in Berkeley. (That party's theme was condiments, naturally.) When I found that glorious 21-letter "backward-gram," I knew it was meant to be a Sunday Times puzzle instead. The idea of the theme extending to the clues themselves felt fresh enough to take seriously.

This was the first crossword I ever sent to Will, so I wanted it to be unimpeachable. Thus: many, many versions and revisions. Tyler Hinman graciously provided many rounds of feedback — laser-focusing me on clean, fresh, quality fill — and convinced me over and over to kill my darlings, in order to root out yucky partials and other woeful entries.

In one version, the SW corner had OBIWAN and YODA, which I desperately wanted to link to my STAR WARS entry elsewhere... Had to kill it. A later version had SHORTZ there instead — meta! — but it crossed with the unspeakable OGPU. Tried a few full-pangram versions, but the fill suffered. Knocked the puzzle down from 142 words to 140, removing 8 blocks in the process.

The theme clues I submitted to Will were ornately A-laden constructions. The STAR WARS clue was the much-geekier "Cash-fat astral saga that has J.J. Abrams (and lacks Khan and Data)." Since J.J. is a puzzle nut, I thought the shout-out would be cool. The BALACLAVAS clue featured Slavs, Tatars, and Kazakhs; the SAND MANDALA clue went to Dharamsala. Will rightly streamlined them — sometimes down to a single, tantalizing word. I trust the Master's instincts completely.

I think my favorite clues are the ones that work in meta-wordplay, like the A MAN...PANAMA clue, which includes another A-only palindrome ending in a country, or those two A-only ANAGRAMS. It felt a bit like George Perec's lipogrammatic novel A Void, where translator Gilbert Adair whipped up an E-less version of "The Raven" ("Blackbird, by Arthur Gordon Pym") and other "highly familiar madrigals." Finding famous A-only films (and a British TV show!) that actually won BAFTA Awards was satisfying as well.

Some other wordplay clues that didn't make it in: "Where Skilling made a killing" (ENRON) is a beheadment; "It turns chefs into chiefs" (AN I); etc. The puzzle's final clue ("Vientiane native") is a letter-bank, for all you NPL-ers.