CROSSWORD #774: A Loss For Words

A LOSS FOR WORDS: [ ACROSS LITE][ PDF] 
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It’s pretty unimaginable to think of a crossword world without the epic Merl Reagle, but, damn it, we have to now. Merl left us way way, way too young, 65 years young to be specific. This past Saturday he left us due to some complication of acute pancreatitis. I repeat, this is unimaginable. When I became serious about constructing crosswords, Merl’s legend stood large over the other numerous bylines I was studying. While I couldn’t do anything remotely like what Merl was doing (who could, really?), so many of his unique talents shone through. His themes, always genuinely funny, felt like complete sets, that is to say, there wasn’t another answer that could have been used for that theme. And they were always stacked on top of each other. His work was stunning.

More than anything, Merl’s unique and enormous personality jumped out of the crossword. If you knew Merl (and honestly everybody who said even five words to the guy felt like you knew him your whole life), you just knew that you were solving his puzzles. It couldn’t be anybody else. If there was any way a crossword could have had a conversational voice, Merl did it better than anybody. There was always a set up, a good sense of pacing, an almost wink-wink voice to a clue when things didn’t quite work, and of course the big payoff. Oh, and he used plenty of green paint, too. “Green paint” is industry shorthand for a crossword answer that while definitely exists in real life, doesn’t feel “conversational enough” to be a tuly legit entry in a puzzle. But since Merl’s puzzles were already gonzo, he could get away with it, and those infelicities were filed uner “Merl Being Merl.”

One puzzle that comes to mind was his 2009 ACPT puzzle “Lipstick on a Pig.” The phrase had been said during the 2008 presidential race, and Merl of course heard it, and asked the question: “what makeup would a pig possibly use?” And he answered that one, all right. My favorite answer of the bunch: FRAGRUNT OINKMENTS.

And man, could Merl talk. He was a chatterbox, equal times entertainer and historian. The numerous phone conversations I had with him would veer wildly: first we’d talk about our own jobs (always too busy), then he’d go off about gonzo entries that Will Weng had gotten away with in the 70s (Merl, always making lists, had hundreds of examples at his fingertips), and then he’d moved over to his piano because he’d just recently listened to one of my bands CDs and he wanted to play his rearrangement of one of the verses because he thought the chorus was so great but the verse needed improvement (and he did improve it, natch), then he’d ask me to do a Google search of “Gray lock Mansion” (misspelled of course because at the time their only search result was a misspelling) so I could hear his band, then he’d ask me to take a chain restaurant add a letter and anagram it to the name of a famous band (CHIPOLTE and THE POLICE), then we’d talk about the Tampa Bay Bucs and how they were going to be awful again this year, oh and just before I’d have to leave Merl would say that he just loved that I used SHOWS HOW in a New York Times grid and that the answer looked like SHOW SHOW. Dizzying, and always fun. I was just thinking last week that a phone call to Merl was probably due, and now, alas, it’s not to be.

Buy some of his books, okay? Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday.