Matthew Lees author page

I've been constructing puzzles since high school (30+ years ago), and treasure a handwritten rejection letter from Eugene Maleska that says "Not bad for a neophyte." (That puzzle never saw the light of day, and rightly so.) About 10 of my puzzles have appeared in major publications.

My background is in math and physics, so I've been exposed to and intrigued by paradoxes for a long time. It wasn't anything academic, though, that prompted the puzzle, but a t-shirt I saw that had a playful take on a classic paradox. On the front was written "The back of this shirt is true," and on the back it showed "The front of this shirt is false." It wasn't a major leap to the puzzle concept.

Coming up with the 15-letter entries was fun, and surprisingly easy once I got over an initial hurdle. I had first wanted the two long entries to cross each other in the center square, one vertical and one horizontal, but it soon became clear that this would be a dead end. Well, almost a dead end. I dabbled briefly with having the answer to 32-across be NINEDOWNISTRUE, and the answer to 9-down be THIRTYTWOACROSS, with the additional two words ISFALSE living elsewhere in the puzzle, being placed symmetrically with PARADOX. A rather nice looking grid resulted, but it was such an ungraceful approach to have one of these theme entries be broken into two parts, that I abandoned this path before it got too far along. Every constructor has false starts.

That meant that the 15-letter entries would have to be either both horizontal or both vertical. There weren't many options. Since they each had to total 15 letters, including ISFALSE (7) AND ISTRUE (6), that leaves 8 and 9 letters. With four more letters for the word DOWN, you've got 4 and 5 letters respectively for the clue numbers. For these entries to be located symmetrically in the grid, you're left with NINE and THREE. It rather wrote itself.

All that was left was to find a nice place for the theme word PARADOX and fill the grid.