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Web-Exclusive Book Review Gridlock: Crossword Puzzles and the Mad Geniuses Who Create Them By Matt Gaffney (Thunder’s Mouth Press) Review by Allan Fallow, November 2006

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Here's a fun little frolic for anyone who has ever tried and succeeded (or failed) to crack the creations of a cruciverbalist—insider slang for a crossword-puzzle constructor. Matt Gaffney solved his first crossword at age nine, sold his first puzzle at 13, and broke into the clique of full-time composers at 27 in 2000. Now he steps outside the box to capture us in Gridlock, a breezy backstage tour of the obsessional worlds that intersect within a 15 x 15 square.

Will this book make you a better solver? Yes—if you believe that understanding the architecture and psychology behind a deceptively simple construct is the best way to tame it. My own case may be instructive. In a 30-year (unrequited) pursuit of crossword mastery, I must have subconsciously absorbed the rules of puzzle construction. Still, I found it a boon to see those laws articulated as Gaffney does here:

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1) "No more than one-sixth of the puzzle grid can be filled by black squares." This limits the black squares in a 225-square puzzle to 38, but "macho gridmasters" exult in how low they can go. Fewest black squares in a New York Times puzzle? That record belongs to Manny Nosowsky, whose 19 has yet to be bested.

2) "Grids must have 180-degree rotational symmetry, meaning that when the puzzle is turned upside down, the pattern of black squares remains unchanged." Why anyone would perform such inverted scrutiny is beyond me—unless it was to admire the payoff of "Hidings," a 1997 Gaffney creation. The completed puzzle held not a single S, yet the theme entries spelled out this tantalizing message: THE NINETEENTH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET CAN BE FOUND ONLY ONE PLACE IN THE ENTIRE PUZZLE GRID. TRY TO FIND IT. By rotating the puzzle 90 degrees, the solver finally saw that the black squares formed an S at the puzzle's core.

3) "Every letter in the grid must be part of both an across and a down word, in order to give the solver two chances at each letter." Hey, they don't call them crosswords for nothing—but they do call them that by mistake. Englishman Arthur Wynne, author of the first crossword puzzle to appear in print (The New York World, December 21, 1913), dubbed his brainstorm Word-Cross. A typesetting error later transposed that title to Cross Word.

4) "Theme words hav[e] to be placed symmetrically in the grid." Themed entries—those longer answers with something in common—impart much of the unity and harmony that I imagine must make crossword puzzles so satisfying for OCD types to solve (speculating here, people—speculating!). In a Patrick Jordan jewel from 2003, for example, seemingly unrelated themes—LEAVE IN THE LURCH, THE REAL THING, and ASH WEDNESDAY—converge in the fourth entry, THE ADDAMS FAMILY: "Each phrase contained a member of the adorably creepy TV clan."

Much of this standardization was the handiwork of puzzle pioneer Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, who coedited Simon & Schuster's first-ever Cross Word Puzzle Book in 1924. Farrar was named founding editor of The New York Times crossword in 1942 and filled that post with distinction until 1969, when the paper's age restrictions forced her to retire. "As Abner Doubleday codified the rules of baseball," Gaffney observes, "Margaret Farrar codified the rules of crosswords. Without rules there can be no beauty."

So much for structure—what about those "mad geniuses" who create the puzzles? It turns out they are neither, but Gridlock paints some disturbing profiles of tortured souls toiling 12 hours on black-and-white masterpieces destined to fetch all of $136. Listen to him analyze their condition:

Cruciverbalists are competitive. "Like toughs showing off their wheels," writes Gaffney, "a certain rarefied stratum of puzzle writer puffs his chest out by attempting a quantifiable feat of crossword constructing." In the precomputerized era of gridmaking, he reports, the record for fewest words in a Times puzzle stood at 56. But in 1997, using a crossword-entry database and grid-filling software (both tools are increasingly accepted by constructors), Frank Longo "burst on the scene with a 54-worder." Four years later, tipped off that a rival was submitting 54-worders to Times crossword editor Will Shortz, Longo grabbed the Holy Grail by writing a 52-word puzzle. "The bottom half of the grid was excruciating," Longo relived the feat on cruciverb.com, "and took at least two weeks."

Make that hypercompetitive: Peter Gordon, the unheralded puzzle editor of The New York Sun, publishes crosswords "now generally considered the equal of the Times" within "hardcore puzzle circles." Gordon in turn wages a running database duel with Longo, whose crossword-entry archive took him 10 years to compile and contains 720,000 entries ranked 1 to 10, "based mostly on feel." Gordon's contains 194,000 words—far fewer than Longo's, Gaffney concedes, but Gordon ranks his words "on a scale of 1 to 100, with certain specified parameters necessary for a word to qualify in a given range."

Cruciverbalists are obsessive. Top solver Amy Reynaldo—she placed fifth of 500 contestants at the 29th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) in Stamford, Connecticut, in 2006—writes a blog called "Diary of a Crossword Fiend." In it she routinely lists her average solving times for as many as half a dozen daily newspaper puzzles. Here's how she fared in February 2006:

It may seem physically impossible to fill in a grid much faster than that, but Al Sanders is shown completing one in 2:02 in Patrick Creadon's crossword documentary Wordplay. A surprise hit when it premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, Wordplay was publicly screened for the second time at that year's ACPT. The audience was unusually receptive.

They are compulsive, too. At cruciverb.com—anointed by Gaffney as the foremost website dedicated to crossword construction—a "friendly, middle-aged Ottawa resident" named Kevin McCann maintains a database of every crossword entry published in leading U.S. newspapers. Pay a small membership fee for McCann's master list and shell out $49 for the software program Crossword Compiler, Gaffney reveals, and you too can churn out cruciverbal concoctions. "Not quite publishable puzzles, perhaps…but still not bad at all."

They suffer the occasional delusion. In a manic moment, Gaffney describes himself as a "well-known crossword constructor." News to me—as is Gaffney's exaltation of Will Shortz as the "one, and only one, rock star-level celebrity in crosswords." I'd be more comfortable reserving that distinction for Jon Stewart, Mike Mussina, or Ken Jennings, all of whom make appearances as matrix mavens here. (Tournament rookie and 74-time Jeopardy! champ Jennings tidily won the C-Group final at the national tourney.)

They are inventive—often stellarly so. Eric Albert, the computer scientist who wrote the first crossword-generating program in August 1989, once constructed a puzzle titled "Night Lights." When the solver used one line to connect all seven appearances of the word STAR in the finished grid, the outline of the Big Dipper magically emerged.

They are funny people. Kicking off the chapter "A to Banzai," in which Gaffney walks us step by step through his creation of an original puzzle, he writes, "Have you ever wanted to sit at a crossword constructor's elbow…to sneak a look at the puzzle-making process?… To study him carefully plotting the grid and crafting the clues; to sucker-punch him in the back of the neck for all those years of torment?

"You've come to the right place, then, minus the sucker-punch thing (don't try it; I've got the reflexes of a veldt-hardened wildebeest)."

Punny, too. Constructor Byron Walden has to seek asylum in the Judges' Room at the ACPT when solvers discover that his clue "Pitched like a girl" is answered FALSETTO. He continues to cower there after "Semi-conductor?" turns out to be TEAMSTER and "Minor keys" yields ISLETS. The Mike Shenk puzzle used to select the ACPT champion is labeled a brainbuster for a single dastardly clue: "Count of Monte Cristo" is solved UNO, DUE, TRE. And a Brendan Emmett Quigley opus is dubbed a mind-masher for posing "Go home?" as the clue for JAPAN.

Computers don't scare them. Every crossword is built in three stages, Gaffney explains: devising a theme, filling the grid, and crafting the clues. Until the next breakthrough in artificial intelligence, he predicts, "humans will continue to do the heavy lifting on parts one and three…but the second part, filling grids with words, is far more cyber-friendly than the other two."

Indeed, a middling grid-fill program can populate the squares of a puzzle in less than 60 seconds. "People don't often talk about it, still fearing a stigma," Gaffney confides, "but it's now generally believed that the majority of top crossword writers…use computer-aided design…in constructing their grids." Kudos to Gaffney for remaining in the minority: he and Walden are two of the dwindling few who spurn grid-fill programs to handcraft their puzzles.

Sudoku, by contrast, terrifies them. Riding Amtrak to the ACPT in Stamford, Gaffney counts passengers solving sudoku versus crosswords. The results practically derail him: Sudoku 6, Crosswords 0. "Especially galling," in Gaffney's eyes, are the two "bubbly, chattering teenaged girls sitting side by side, solving sudoku together from an oversized book…. Even the cool kids in high school are solving sudoku now."

The true reason for the cruciverbal backlash against this new puzzle form is the fear of extinction—or at least supernumeracy: "Many of us have spent serious chunks of our lives honing the craft of crossword-puzzle writing," he points out, "and along comes this computer-generated fad that's winning the hearts and minds of the masses. If everyone loves sudoku so much, who needs us anymore?"

Cruciverbalists revel in esoterica. Encountering math Ph.D. and fellow grid ironman Dave Tuller on the train to Stamford, Gaffney throws down the gauntlet—"Play some hangman?"—and the titans lock horns in a Word Nerd Smackdown. After solving Gaffney's ZEPHYR (a gentle breeze) in five deft guesses, Tuller stymies the author with SYZYGY (opposing points in the lunar orbit).

This is really demoralizing [Gaffney reflects]. "I just didn't think there could've been any other 6-letter words besides RHYTHM that didn't have A, E, I, O, or U."

Tuller thinks for a second, staring straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of him.

"Actually, it could've been CRWTHS," he says. "A CRWTH is some kind of Welsh musical instrument."

As that exchange makes clear, Gridlock never lives up to its hyperbolic subtitle. "Gifted brainiacs," granted—but to dub these two "mad geniuses" is to misunderestimate both words. Indeed, a perfectly accurate alternative subtitle might be Cursed-Nerd Puzzles and the Monomaniacal Nebbishes Who Inflict Them on an Unsuspecting Populace.

I say that purely in the spirit of objective literary criticism, you understand. It has nothing to do with the fact that Gaffney stumped me the other day with a 10-letter phrase for "Run up to the Hill?" I had to cravenly consult the answer page to learn it was SENATE RACE. Let's keep that our little secret.

Allan Fallow, managing editor of AARP Books, lives for the day when grid constructors Linda and Charles Preston or Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon immortalize his writing in a double-crostic puzzle.

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