Well folks, I'm a bit late discovering this, but Merl Reagle has died.
Any Crossword nut probably knows who he was.
Being too involved with my own personal drama and ordeals for the past month (but never too busy to complete a crossword...they've been my therapy for decades), I opened up our Sunday Seattle Times this morning and immediately frowned, after I'd done the folding, to discover that they'd stuck an L.A. Times Crossword in the place of Merl Reagle's usual one. "What the hell! What's this doing here? Where's my Merl? Hope he didn't die or something!"
Sadly, I quick found a little note above that damned interloping puzzle, directing me to an explanation at the front of the section. One of my favorite all-time Puzzle Masters died on August 22, Merl Reagle, only 65 years old, and he will be sorely missed in my household of mind-twisted, pun-loving, brain-kinker vocabulary aficionados.
Reagle’s signature clues were more likely to be inscrutable brain-twisting puns or anagrams than recondite factoids.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/obituaries/merl-reagle-whose-crossword-puzzles-delighted-clued-in-solvers-dies-at-65/
Merl Reagle, a playfully irreverent crossword puzzle constructor whose clues set off spirited cerebrations from his fans rather than frustrated surrenders to dictionary arcana, died Saturday in Tampa, Florida. He was 65.
The cause was complications of pancreatitis, his wife, Marie Haley, said.
“Many of today’s top constructors, in fact, got their inspiration from him,” his friend Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times, said on Wordplay, the crossword blog on nytimes.com. In an interview, Shortz added, “His puzzles were genuinely funnier than anybody else’s, and he was an expert interlocker.”
Reagle started creating crossword puzzles when he was 6. (“The English language was the best toy a boy ever had,” he once said.) At the urging of his high school English teacher in 1967, when he was barely 17, he became the youngest person to sell one to The Times — for $10.
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The paper is asking for feedback on their temporary replacement with that L.A. Times puzzle...it was solvable in easy time, a big disappointment, actually. Absolutely nothing special. I think that the "gotcha" element of a Merl Reagle puzzle will never be seen again.
The best Merl puzzles were the ones that made me groan, as his theme finally hit me and I could excitedly fill in all of his question marks. I will so miss those sort of challenges.
Another one of our generation gone too soon... 