The Puzzler's Mansion
By Eric Berlin
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"I have always been a puzzler," tells children's author Eric Berlin. "When I was a kid, I would buy puzzle books from the Scholastic book club and sit on the blacktop at recess and solve them. I know exactly when and where I bought my first issue of Games, the magazine that was hugely influential on me and other puzzlers of my generation—I was eleven years old and we were waiting for my father at an airport when I saw it on a magazine rack."
Berlin eventually turned his passion for puzzles into a career; his crosswords often appear in the New York Times. He also crafted a clever series of puzzle-stuffed novels for middle grade readers that debuted in 2007 with The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (Putnam), followed by 2009's The Potato Chip Puzzles and this year's The Puzzler's Mansion.
Like the author, the series' twelve-year-old main character, Winston Breen, is also a hardcore puzzle fanatic, who reasons his way through a plethora of often interwoven puzzles and riddles to solve a mystery at the core of each book. In The Puzzler's Mansion, hitting bookstores this month, Winston and his pals are invited to an over-the-top puzzle party at the home of a famous musician. But when valuable prizes go missing, no guests are above suspicion, and Winston resolves to nab the culprit.
Like the other Winston Breen books, it's an entertaining, interactive read that keeps the neurons quick-firing and the pages swiftly turning.
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"I have always been a puzzler. . . "
—BERLIN |
AUTHORLINK: Congratulations on the third Winston Breen book! How did Winston come about? Did you conceive of it as a series?
BERLIN: Winston was created shortly after I read Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game, a book I somehow missed in my youth despite being a diehard puzzle lover. All my friends in the puzzle world love that book. When I picked it up as an adult on their recommendation, I had the idea that it was a mystery with different puzzles interlaced throughout the story. That isn't exactly the case—there's just the one overriding puzzle that all the characters compete to solve. After I read and enjoyed it, I thought, well, maybe I can write a mystery with different puzzles interlaced throughout the story. Once that idea took hold, it wouldn't let go. The result was The Puzzling World of Winston Breen.
I knew that I wanted to write several Winston books, but I was too chicken to try to sell it as a series—what if I only had the one book in me? So after the first book was edited and complete, I got started on The Potato Chip Puzzles. (Thankfully, it turned out I had more than one book in me.) And after that was sold and out the door, I got moving on The Puzzler's Mansion.
AUTHORLINK: The Winston books are fully loaded with puzzles. How do you come up with so many fresh puzzle ideas?
BERLIN: Well, I have solved thousands and thousands of puzzles in my life, and I attend puzzle events much like the ones I've designed for Winston and his friends. It all amounts to a sort of ad hoc master's degree in puzzles. Plus, I am determined to show kids that puzzles can go far beyond crosswords and word seeks (not that there is anything wrong with those). It's a fun challenge to try to come up with a puzzle that might be found on a Ferris wheel, or on a planetarium ceiling, or on a whole bunch of wooden strips, or that uses musical notes. As for how I come up with those ideas... well, like so many other creative endeavors, it involves a lot of walking around my house, staring at the ceiling, trying to have a brilliant idea. Happily, sometimes they actually come.
AUTHORLINK:What's your writing process? Do you map out the storyline first, then come up with puzzles that fit the plot? Devise a puzzle first then write a scene around it? Do you know how the story will end before you begin?
BERLIN:I don't do outlining, per se, but I usually have a good idea of where I want the story to go—both generally and in the next few chapters. Sometimes it turns out I am wrong, though, and I have to throw out a whole lot of pages and try again. That's the way it goes, at least with me. I'm told there are writers that bull straight through the first draft practically without stopping. I cannot imagine how they do this.
While I don't figure out every puzzle in advance, I do have to nail down the final puzzle, the one that uses all the other answers Winston and his friends will discover over the course of the story. Constructing this puzzle (the "metapuzzle," in puzzle-constructor lingo) will give me a set of answer words that I need to turn into still more puzzles. Each of these puzzles will get its own scene, and other important events will happen in these scenes. Having all these puzzles sketched out is very instructive to me as I try to find the shape of the book.
AUTHORLINK:Classical music and musicians figure significantly in The Puzzler's Mansion. Why? Could Richard Overton, the puzzle event's host, have just as easily been a rock musician?
BERLIN:What a good question. At the most basic level, anybody might fall in love with puzzles to such a degree that he (or she) might decide to create a puzzle hunt for his friends. And any wealthy puzzle lover, like Richard Overton, might choose to design a really elaborate puzzle hunt. So, sure, Richard Overton could have been a rock musician, or a banker, or a retired astronaut. Puzzle love is what's key.
That said, it just feels right that Richard should be a classical musician. For starters, he is based on Stephen Sondheim, who has thrown puzzle parties not unlike the one Overton hosts for his friends—one was written up a long, long time ago in Games magazine. I read that as a child and yearned to attend just such a party. I didn't want to make Richard Overton a Broadway lyricist—a classical musician was close enough, but also different enough. And the more I looked into the clever things classical musicians have done over the years, the more appropriate my decision seemed.
I give an example in the book when Richard talks about Mozart's "Table Music," a duet in which one of the performers plays with the sheet music upside-down. But I could have put in any number of other examples: Edward Elgar once sent a coded message that people are still trying to decipher. J.S. Bach's fugues have a mathematical complexity that fascinate people to this day. While not every musician is a puzzler, and not every puzzler is a musician, there seems to be a strong correlation between the two.
AUTHORLINK:When did you start selling your puzzles?
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“I was unemployed and decided to kill time by trying to create a crossword I might sell to the New York Times.”
—BERLIN |
BERLIN: I didn't start selling puzzles until 2001 or so. I was unemployed and decided to kill time by trying to create a crossword I might sell to the New York Times. It took me the better part of a summer—I didn't know at the time that most cruciverbalists use software to facilitate construction. But I sold that puzzle, and over the course of the last ten or more years, I've sold more than fifty others to the Times and other places.
AUTHORLINK: When did you begin writing for children, and why? What are some of the things you keep in mind as you craft stories for young people?
BERLIN: My main goal was to write the sort of book that I—as a kid-sized puzzle lover—would have gone gaga for if I had found it on my library bookshelf. In all of my books, I try to keep the focus on the story; if I can fit a couple of puzzles in a given chapter, that's great, but I wouldn't want to force it. And I enjoy mysteries that are theoretically solvable by an observant reader, so I try to sneak in a few clues on the whodunit side.
AUTHORLINK: How did you sell the series? Did you use an agent? I'd guess it was a quick sale—the books are so fun and appealing. What was your reaction when you learned there was an offer for Winston?
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“My agent is William Reiss of the John Hawkins Agency—he was the one and only person to send me a positive response during my agent-seeking days.”
—BERLIN
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BERLIN: My agent is William Reiss of the John Hawkins Agency—he was the one and only person to send me a positive response during my agent-seeking days. If memory serves, he placed the book with Putnam in about six months, maybe a little more. I was pretty over the moon when the call came in, as you might imagine. (I seem to recall that at the time I was also really, really feverish, so the celebration was on the subdued side.)
AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?
BERLIN:I'm not 100 percent sure. I have pages on far too many different projects, and I am currently trying to figure out which one is calling to me with the loudest voice. I think it will likely be an adventure novel for kids. All I know for sure is that I'm done with Winston for at least a little while. I want to see what else I can do.
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