New York Times, Friday, December 4, 2015

The quad stack crossword that you see here is unique in my history of constructions in this genre, because of the relative speed with which it came together. The saga started with receipt of a rejection from Will of a different puzzle, due to one particular spanning 15 that he did not particularly like. Once I realized that the earlier submission was not salvageable, I set forth to create a different one with the same general architecture.

After fixing a cup of coffee and staring at a blank wall for half an hour, I suddenly remembered that the great Merl Reagle had published a triple stack 15x15 in Dell Champion Crosswords, with the creative but easier to handle DAYTON TENNESSEE (famous for the Scopes "Monkey Trial"). I e-mailed Merl that I was going to "steal" his entry if he was OK with it, and he shot back "Knock yourself out!"

Long story short. About 7 hours later, I had a half-decent grid, and after a further 8 hours, it was sufficiently polished that I felt it could be sent to Will first thing in the morning. Let me emphasize that quads typically take me several weeks to build, involving much trial and error, and there are many that go nowhere for months. Anyhow, when Will got back to me, he basically liked it but challenged me to remove one of the long down words (LISSOMENESS) and several of the short words. Several more hours of work (plus two cheater squares) later, I had the final version which I hope you'll agree raised the overall quality another notch or two.

Ending on a bittersweet note, I reminded Merl of his "stolen" entry in the last phone conversation we had, about a week before his tragic death. With his trademark chuckle, he said that he was looking forward to it, and then we moved to a more technical discussion of how to create stacks. I am so sorry that Merl never had a chance to see the final product.

MAS gives us a colorful selection of entries in the quad-stack, CELESTIAL EMPIRE my favorite. I should have known that one, being Taiwanese and all, but it's such a snappy answer I really wanted to look it up. (It was in use during the 19^th century.) And I CAN SEE FOR MILES is such a catchy song.

I also liked APPLIED RESEARCH, although I would have preferred a more colorful clue, i.e. how Jaeger manned robots were born from APPLIED RESEARCH. (My grasp of reality is tenuous.) I'm glad DAYTON TENNESSEE (population less than 10K) got clued with respect to the Scopes Monkey Trial, which makes it gridworthy in my eyes.

I've appreciated MAS's efforts to make his fill cleaner on these wide-open grids, which is no mean feat. Given how tough these constructions are, limiting the gluey bits to things like CTR, ISE, SHA, SNO, RTES is impressive. I'm always mixed on INO (Greek mythology) and APIS (Egyptian mythology) since they're not nearly as recognizable as Zeus/Hera/Isis/Ra, but if the crossings are fair, this mythology-lover tends to look the other way.

I've also appreciated his efforts to create flow, using a ton of white space to connect all areas of the grid. It's fantastic to get entries like LONG STEMMED and DETOX DIETS running straight through the stack. One of the knocks I have on puzzles built on grid-spanning entries is that there's often not much else besides those long entries. Not today!

I was so impressed by the sheer feat of construction and eye-popping visual impact … until I hit THREE TENS. Now, I'm not usually one to judge a grid by its weakest entry, but this one left a sour taste in my mouth. I researched it to see if THREE TENS was some special holding like a Dead Man's Hand or Pocket Aces, so badly wanting to turn up something, anything that would redeem the entry. But, no. If it had been some tiny arbitrary entry off in a corner, that would have been one thing. But THREE TENS is essential to the stack.

Still, an entertaining solve.