Henry Hook

Today I opened a puzzled saved from two laptops ago. When it opened on the screen I looked at its size first, a large one, 21 X 21, not quite Sunday-size but this isn't going to be fast, not within minutes, and its shape, attractive with nice wide open areas with double barrels all over both horizontal and vertical, that is where the theme entries will be and there are a lot of them to help suss the thing out, the title next, "flip the bird," what? That is very uncrossword-like, who did that? Henry Hook. Oh. Well. It's all become clear

Henry would do that, remind us of something foul. It's why we love him so.

"Flip the bird" will mean something different in Wordlandia than it does in the world at large. It can mean an actual bird will be flipped. When it comes to words, and codes, and tricks, and Henry Hook Tomfoolery we can expect birds to be spelled backwards. We can expect this in the large open areas and since it is Henry Hook we are assured it will be genius. It will be entertaining. It will be deviantly clever. It will be cute, and terribly astute. That is Henry Hook.

Yes. Exactly. We see it right off, regular words clued deviantly, "composes" is the misdirecting clue for "calms."

The red square starting the long entry is

17a the clue: World capital since 1923
22a the clue: Advice in case of nuclear attack?

The question mark implies a goofy answer.

I do not know the 1923 capital out of hand. Israel was after that. So is Alaska I had A and N and K so I thought of birds instead of places with those letters, AWK and the like Auckland perhaps, I need a place, a capital, and a bird maybe backwards. Toucan is looking nice but doesn't work as anagram. I move along to other areas fill in other certain letters, past tenses, plurals, that sort of thing, keep looking back at the corner and see ANKARA. The bird is not an anagram for Ankara, and it's not just another bird, Turkey spelled backwards. Not just the clue, the whole puzzle is now solved.

I had KC for the start of the entry below it but that combination does not start words in English that I know. If only it were backwards then it could end in CK instead, and the common sense answer "duck and cover" can become "kcud and cover" boom, the whole puzzle solved and confirmed, just like that.

Really, it is. The theme is cracked and completely understood. The whole point of Henry Hook's mission is keep his theme secret for long as possible, to hold off that "aha" moment for a point of frustration. He wants solvers to be stumped. He wants them to put the puzzle down and come back to it with a fresh start, and none of that is going to happen because this thing is cracked. It's just a matter now of going through and discovering which birds Henry Hook spelled backwards throughout and see how clever Henry Hook is with his bird related phrases, how funny all that is and how entertaining Henry Hook is when he set his mind to being funny. Truly, the man is a riot. And beyond that the puzzle is all fill. The whole puzzle is fill to hold together Henry Hook's collection of backward spelled birds so that common words and phrases like "Ankara Turkey" and "duck and cover" are rendered to spellings with flipped birds.

If you understand him, the man is a riot. And if you do not understand him, he is rude as can be, bus terminal rude, muttering fallen down drunk homeless malcontent rude, banned from polite society in fact, banned from the competitions, for awhile until rehabilitated. It was not that everybody could not handle Henry so much as Henry could not handle polite people, genius in their own right so much thicker than he. He can't stand it. He has precious few friends. Henry is quite good at compiling crossword puzzles. He was the lad who stunned Eugene Maleska by responding personally to a message hidden inside a crossword that is read separately once completely solved by holding the puzzle and turning it around like a wheel, "You have just finished the world's most remarkable crossword." At age fourteen Henry Hook wrote a puzzle with its own hidden message specifically for Eugene Maleska, editor of NYT Crossword puzzles, "What makes you think your puzzle is so amazing?"

This amused and impressed Eugene Maleska.

Adult Henry would sit down and in just a few minutes, ten maximum, he'd have his puzzles for the Boston Globe written for the week. He just thinks them and writes them. A week's work in just a few minutes. And he cheats. He misspells to force things to fit, breaks other rules of symmetry, just to have three or four extra but fantastic thematic entries crammed in illegally. Solvers forgave him because he is so entertaining. Turns out, straight up genius or not, writing puzzles is the only thing Henry Hook ever could do. He is incapable of any work. He is a social disaster.

Was. I am dismayed to see his Wikipedia page says that Henry Hook died a few weeks ago, October 27th 2015. Rest in peace, Henry Hook, you mad genius. I'll go back now and check out the rest of your flipped birds. I'm certain they're all very amusing. Thank you for a lifetime of cheerful and impressive puzzles.