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The puzzle world lost another legend this week. Henry Hook left the world at the tender age of 60. Whatever we in the puzzle community did to piss off the gods, well, it must have been a doozy as the loss of him and Merl Reagle weeks apart is brutal. Henry's puzzles were very singular: cranky, ornery, classical, irreverent, bold. Sometimes even laugh out loud funny. His willingness to find the boundaries, and then obliterate them with a "go big or go home" approach was a huge shot in the arm in the early '80s. Pretty much every theme in the book has been done already by either Henry, Merl, and Mike Shenk. We're vamping on ideas now.
It's tough for me to write a eulogy as, well, I didn't know Henry that much. I think if I added up all the times I saw him in person (which would be three), and then threw in the odd email, the sum total of words I might have said to him was maybe 250. It's odd to have such a towering figure in my crossword family be such a cipher, but Henry wanted it that way. When we talked it was mostly about cryptics and how he could somehow write more of them. I had given him some potential leads, but he never took them. But boy did the "curmudgeon" mask fall off when we started talking about it. It was like stumbling upon the biggest rock nerd with the encyclopedic knowledge of all the most obscure releases, only this was, well, an equally esoteric topic. Esoteric in the states at least.
When Merl left us, it was extremely hard to process as not only he a huge influence on all of puzzlers (both with ramping up the humor and going indie), but he was our friend. And that was true, there wasn't anybody he didn't consider and treat as a friend. The loss of Henry is big, really big, but this feels more like losing John Lennon. Henry was someone who loomed large in the industry, whose legend every one knew, whose work directly or indirectly influenced every body (whether acknowledged or not), but yet, he was a complete unknown to his fans and yet we feel we "knew him" through his work. Matt Gaffney shares this sentiment as he descibed meeting Henry as "like meeting Elvis."
Some further reading about Henry can be found here, here, and here.
On a much lighter note, I wrote today's BuzzFeed puzzle. Get it here.
Share the puzzle. New one on Monday.
Brendan Emmett Quigley creates custom-made puzzles for all occasions: birthdays and bar mitzvahs, anniversaries and retirements. You name it. Need a puzzle for your website or your publication? He can do that, too.
Brendan's custom work clients have included The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, BeerAdvocate, Boston Magazine, De Beers, The Decemberists, ESPN, The Improper Bostonian, Lollapuzzoola, McSweeney's, Phish, Reflexive, The Smithsonian Magazine, St. Martin's Press, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, and Andrew Weil.
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