Family Puzzles

I grew up doing jigsaw puzzles with my family. There were puzzles for the whole family that took up a side table or a dedicated board. And there were small puzzles that belonged just to me.

Not only were puzzles part of my family culture but my family had a particular culture when it came to puzzles. I knew families that sprayed completed puzzles with lacquer and hung them, as works of art or trophies. We just disassembled them after a day and a couple of months later brought out another.

One of our strongest family customs, which I credit to my dad, was that we didn’t consult the picture on the box after opening it. We had to build up the picture from memory and the pieces themselves. I didn’t realize how rare this was until I started to participate in the “community puzzle” at my local library and declined to look at the box there.

Together my family got through some fiendish jigsaw puzzles, such as Little Red Riding Hood’s Hood, a circle that was entirely one shade of red. And puzzles got us through a hard time: in the year after my brother died in his twenties, my mother and I did a lot of puzzles silently in the side room.

Five years ago, my dad went to Antarctica. He was in his late seventies, so that was a notable feat. (Since then, he’d been on an Arctic cruise, so maybe not so notable.) He came back with lots of photos to show me on his laptop.

One of those images showed scores of black and white (and orange-beaked) penguins on the slushy gray Antarctic landscape. I looked at that and thought, “That could be a jigsaw puzzle.” A damned hard jigsaw puzzle, to be sure. So I snuck the file onto my thumb drive, sent it off to a company that makes custom puzzles, and gave it to Dad as a present.

This month, four and a half years and one global plague that keeps everyone home later, Dad reported that he had completed the penguin puzzle!

Robin Categories and Controversies, part 1

This page from Detective Comics, #208 (June 1954), comes courtesy of little Bully’s Tumblr stream “What the ’Tec?” To play along with its categories, it’s useful to know that “Animals” means “Mammals.” And it’s useful to know a mammal that begins with N.

This weekly Robin plays categories with recent Robin controversies (which are really no more than kerfuffles).

Red Robin. DC Comics may already be revising the history of its Tim Drake character in the current continuity. Two of the much-hyped #1 issues stated that he had served as Robin. However, at the San Diego Comic-Con, Teen Titans, #0, writer Scott Lobdell suggested that that character went straight into the Red Robin identity.

Such speed could have been a response to fan complaints that new universe’s Batman had gone through kid sidekicks like they were Kleenex. But the change and the thought that this Tim has never been Robin (and thus never experienced even a version of the adventures people read from 1989 to 2011) produced even more fan exasperation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the final text of Teen Titans, #0, restores a bit of that history.

That said, I can imagine quick adoption of the Red Robin identity being quite in character for Tim Drake. His superhero origin would go something like this.

“Batman needs a Robin, sir.”

“Go home, kid.”

Two days later. “Is this Mr. Wayne? My name is Timothy Drake. Batman needs a Robin.”

“How did you get this number? Uh, why are you speaking to me about Batman? Hello? Hello?”

Three days later. “Good takedown, Batman, but a little rough. See, Batman needs a Robin.”

“Leave me alone! You know the last Robin didn’t work out.”

Six days later. “Hello, Batman.”

“Why are you wearing a costume?”

“Nightwing helped me with it.”

“I told you both: I don’t want another Robin.”

“I’m not Robin, sir. I’m Red Robin!”

“Sigh. All right.”

Old Robin. Retronaut shared a portfolio of Andy Warhol and Nico dressed up as the Dynamic Duo for a magazine photo shoot in 1967. This was of course during the era of television-fueled Batman camp.

TOMORROW: Controversies for letters B, I, and N.

Oz on the iPad

One of my gifts this holiday/birthday season was an iPad, and one of my first apps purchased for that iPad was Oz, created by Boluga.

The text is an abridgment of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the aesthetic is derived from W. W. Denslow’s illustrations. Not as they originally appeared, though, since the “pages” have also been digitally aged and dusted with grime for a “classic” look. In addition, key phrases are enlarged and laid diagonally on many screens, especially those with no art. As I noted before, Denslow’s thick-line cartooning adapts well to this format.

Kirkus found that shortening the text removed a lot of Baum’s charm. Knowing the story already, I didn’t pay much attention to that, but I agree that a lot of Baum’s strength as a storyteller—his ability to create a verisimilitudinous fairyland through respect for individual characters and quotidian detail—appears in passages unnecessary for the plot and therefore likely to be the first to go.

Some of the screens have interactive elements, but I found them inconsistent. From one page to the next, the art can:

• do nothing but look pretty. It’s possible to spot these by the lack of a circular icon in the upper right corner. 
• come with animation, music, or other sounds, but (aside from rerunning the screen by hitting that icon) there’s nothing for readers to do. This is how the Wicked Witches die, for example.
• let readers play with visual elements, though to no clear purpose. I don’t know why one is supposed to knock down the Soldier with the Green Whiskers’s gun. One can fill the poppy field with poppies drifting snowglobe-style from the sky, which is kind of pretty, but it doesn’t seem to grow from the story. 
• allow readers to be part of the story by, say, taking the Scarecrow off his pole or putting the heart in the Tin Woodman. These screens are, of course, the most fun. But Kirkus complains that such games and puzzles require too much fine-motor control for the app’s intended audience. I must admit I still haven’t got the Guardian of the Gates’s key into the lock—I’d actually decided it didn’t belong there.

Not being able to distinguish one type of interaction from another was also a little frustrating. For example, after Mr. Joker, the clown in the China Country, shatters into dozens of pieces, I kept trying to reassemble him. But I think he’s a lost cause.

Perhaps a version 2.0 will fix those frustrations. But honestly, for 99¢, Oz was a fine way to learn some of the tricks of my iPad while revisiting some familiar faces and places. I was more than satisfied.

Incidentally, I noticed only one sign of the MGM movie’s influence on this version: when the Tin Woodman’s heart goes into his chest, it starts to tick. All the other details are from the book.

The Big Puzzle Party Wrap-Up!

Welcome to the last day of Winston Breen's Puzzle Party, observing the publication of Eric Berlin's The Potato Chip Puzzles! The first mystery to address is whether I'll be so cruel as to make visitors read (or at least scroll) all the way down to the end of this posting to find the link for the final puzzle challenge.

And that answer's easy. Of course I will.

Here's my interview with Eric Berlin about creating puzzles, creating stories, and creating the Puzzling World of Winston Breen (bonus bit of interview back here):

Which came first for you--creating puzzles or writing stories? What's your usual starting-point for a Winston Breen novel?

I’ve always been a writer, though it took me a long time to figure out what I should be writing. I spent a few years after college believing myself to be a playwright, and I’ve written a lot of magazine articles for tech-oriented magazines. The Puzzling World of Winston Breen was my first novel.

I don’t think I gave any thought to creating puzzles (as opposed to solving them, which I’ve always done religiously) until 1996 or so, and even then it was just, “Well, I have this single decent idea, let’s put it down on paper and then get some ice cream.” I started constructing crosswords as a hobby maybe five years later, and around that same time I had the idea for the first Winston book. Or rather: I had the idea for a novel that would center around a 12-year-old puzzle nut, and it would have puzzles all through it for the reader to solve. What that book was going to be about I still wouldn’t know for another six months.

Now that I’ve written two Winston Breen books, the pattern is clear: In each book, Winston needs to get involved in some sort of grand, high-stakes puzzle event, and there also needs to be an underlying mystery for him to solve. I’m not sure how many variations on these very particular circumstances I can come up with--the last thing I want is for these books to feel forced. But I do have both the puzzle idea and the mystery for a third story, so it’s likely that the series will continue for at least one more book. I’ll worry about book four some other day. Or I’ll move on to a whole other thing!

The Winston Breen stories involve some elaborate public puzzles, which we don't usually see in real life. How do you draw on your own life or childhood to add verisimilitude to your plots?

Oh, I see elaborate public puzzles all the time! Let’s see...every year I go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the “Mystery Hunt,” a weekend-long team puzzle competition. I’ve got a team of forty people or so, and we barricade ourselves somewhere on campus and pit our increasingly exhausted brains against 150 or more insanely difficult puzzles.

I also go to two events hosted every year by the humorist Dave Barry. He and his friends create the Miami Herald Hunt and, more recently, the Washington Post Hunt [coming up next month]. These events attract thousands of people, and feature puzzles every bit as theatrical as any you’d find in a Winston Breen novel.

I attend these events every year, and a couple of others to boot, and the experience is always the same: I feel massive frustration when I can’t immediately see through a puzzle to its solution. I banter with my equally confused friends as we brainstorm different ideas. And then suddenly one of us--and sometimes it’s even me--gets the euphoric satisfaction of having all the lights in his brain turned on simultaneously. Aha! The answer! Hooray! Then there is much high-fiving, and then a mad dash to the next puzzle.

In short: Except for the mysteries Winston has to solve, the Winston Breen books are biographical.

Hmmm. I guess when I wrote that “we don't usually see” elaborate puzzles in real life, I just hadn't looked hard enough. Puzzle fests might be no rarer than the murder victims or bank robbers or real-estate speculators in sheets that the heroes of other series keep stumbling over.

A lot of writers aiming for broad popular readerships give their protagonists friends or siblings of the opposite sex, so the central group contains both boys and girls. The Potato Chip Puzzles starts with a completely masculine cast: Winston, his two best pals, his principal, the teacher who becomes team advisor, and the chip magnate who's invented the puzzles. But this is also the story in which Winston and his friends discover GIRLS. How did you go about planning that?

It wasn’t so much a plan. It was more me realizing that if there are thirty kids attending this event, some of them really ought to be girls. And, furthermore, there would be a nice symmetry if Winston’s all-boy team allied itself with an all-girl team. And further furthermore, I really liked Bethany Seymour, the most outgoing member of the girl’s team--her character took shape right away. So, boom, suddenly I had a bunch of girls in my book.

But I really like to keep the plot chugging along, and I didn’t want to get bogged down in a lot of does-he-like-me?/does-she-like-me? pre-teen angst. Winston and his friends are the right age for that, but it’s not really what these books are about. There’s definitely some boy/girl tension and awkwardness in there, but I was careful to keep all that stuff on a low boil.

What's the hardest part of coming up with new puzzles? How do you tailor them to audiences who are probably younger than your favorite pants?

That’s the hard part, all right--making them solvable for young audiences. The average classroom of twelve-year-olds is so diverse. You’ve got kids reading adult novels and you’ve got kids who get no mental exercise at all, all sitting in one room. Even the kids who are interested in Winston Breen--they cover a wide variety of solving levels. As a puzzle creator, I want to come up with original, clever, never-before-seen puzzles...but brilliant puzzles don’t mean anything if the audience can’t solve them. A brilliant puzzle that no one can solve is called a “failure.”

(One of the puzzles in this week’s Puzzle Party, in fact, was very pretty and original and I was very happy with how it came out. Except none of my testsolvers could solve it. I tweaked it to make it easier...and still nobody could figure it out. What could I do? I had to toss it. That’s the way it goes.)

In the Winston books, I cope with this problem by showing a puzzle multiple times. First you see a puzzle just as Winston sees it, without any instructions and with no clear idea what you’re supposed to do. If you want, you can stop reading and try to figure it out. If you can’t, that’s okay: As you keep reading, you’ll learn a great deal of information about how the puzzle works. A couple of pages later, you’ll get another opportunity to solve it, and hopefully this time it will be a little easier. And if you still can’t solve it--well, that’s okay, too. Another puzzle is coming up in just a little while. I think only the most gifted readers will solve every puzzle in the books, but almost everybody can solve at least a few of them.

A lot of your puzzles are specific to American English, or American culture. Has your publisher's foreign-rights department talked to you about that?

Weirdly, back in 2007 at the publishing industry’s big foreign-rights convention, the first Winston book received more inquiries than any other book in my publisher’s line-up. (Or so my editor informed me.) I predicted confidently to my wife that not a single one of those inquiries would result in a foreign edition. Because how could it? Many of the puzzles are untranslatable--they have to be in English. A really determined foreign publisher could probably figure something out, but that seems like an awful lot of work. I know if I was running a publishing house in Spain, I’d just as soon buy a different book and simply plonk the translated text onto the page.

So, yeah, no foreign editions for me. My publisher doesn’t seem to mind.

The big new thing in puzzles now seems to be logic puzzles that are pumped out on a computer: sudoku and Kenken. They're not culturally specific, they always have an answer, and they start with software. Are they changing the culture of puzzles?

Well, they’re bringing in a new group of solvers, and that’s always nice. I am thrilled that a bunch of logic puzzles have gone so wildly mainstream. If you told me back in 2004 this was going to happen, I’d have laughed myself sick. Logic puzzles are supposed to be this itty-bitty niche product, not a New York Times bestseller!

Thanks, Eric, for that look at the making of the Winston Breen books!

Now was there something else I was going to do? Hmm hmm hmm. Oh, yes! Here's the link to the final Puzzle Party challenge. Good luck, folks!

Winston Breen Throws a Puzzle Party Starting Today

Today is the start of the Puzzle Party blog tour and puzzle challenge heralding the publication of The Potato Chip Puzzles, by Eric Berlin. Find all the contest details at the Puzzle Party website, including news of the impressive grand prize supplied by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Each stage of the blog tour will offer a link to one more downloadable puzzle:

• today, 16 April: A Patchwork of Books
• 17 April (that would be tomorrow--see, you're solving these conundra already!): Fuse #8
• 18 April: Shelf Elf
• 19 April: Books Together
• 20 April: Bookshelves of Doom
• 21 April: Chicken Spaghetti
• 22 April: Oz and Ends

Yes, the tour winds up here! You can't solve the final puzzle and win the grand prize unless you come back.

On the 22nd I'll post, in addition to the link to that final puzzle, an interview with author Eric Berlin. Here's a little preview of our colloquy:

I'm guessing you were a fan of Encyclopedia Brown when you were young. What did those books mean to you as a reader? What lessons did you take from them as a writer? Any other childhood favorites?

I was indeed a fan of Encyclopedia Brown--I pretty much swallowed those books whole. I don’t know that I extracted any meaning from them at the time....but in retrospect it’s clear how pivotal they were in helping me discover who I am. I’m sure I read a sports story or two as a child, but I have no memory of it. No, for me, it was mysteries and puzzles: Encyclopedia Brown, Scott Corbett’s wordplay-drenched The Big Joke Game, and Alvin’s Secret Code by Clifford Hicks.

I made my guess not just because Eric's a puzzle fan and the Encyclopedia Brown books are built around solve-it-yourself mysteries. Rather, as I read The Potato Chip Puzzles I thought that Winston Breen and some of his friends would fit right into Donald J. Sobol's Idaville. In that town all the kids have individual quirks: collecting teeth, bull-fighting, running con games, animal welfare, solving mysteries. Winston's quirk is solving and making puzzles. Everyone knows that's what Winston likes, and his friends are cool with that.