Welcome to Sunday Puzzle -- your weekly chance have some fun, hang out with friends, exercise your wits, and occasionally pick up an educational tidbit or two in the process.
Sunday Puzzle now posts Friday evenings at 8 pm Eastern / 5 pm Pacific. (And if you'd like easier puzzles to try your hand at and get into practice, there's our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, which posts Saturday evenings at 8 pm Eastern / 5 pm Pacific.)
This month, in a shameless effort to seduce members of the Readers and Book Lovers series Monday Murder Mystery into joining our puzzle circle, Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up has been featuring Mystery Month. Each week the solution to the acrostic puzzle there is the title of a great mystery book.
And because I'm running way late on things this week, Mystery Month invades the regular Sunday Puzzle as well tonight. I've taken a book I was going to use in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up and used it here instead (but with considerably more challenging clues).
The answer to tonight's acrostic is the title of a classic puzzler by one of the greatest mystery writers of the Golden Age of Mysteries. Who's the writer, what's the book? Solve tonight's puzzle and find out!
Ah, but what if you're not into mysteries? Don't despair! There's a brand-new mystery-free Crypto-Gremlin waiting for you in tonight's diary as well. Come on down and join the party...
First up, here's tonight's Crypto-Gremlin.
Crypto-Gremlins are a special type of cryptogram which can't be solved by online code-cracking programs but which can be solved by the application of human wits.
For those of you unfamiliar with this type of puzzle, you can find complete instructions here.
For tonight's puzzle, I've provided a quote which I loved when I read it and thought it would be fun to share with you folks in case you haven't read it yet. Likely you haven't. The interview it's from appeared in an unusual place which most of you probably don't read. Google search turns up only 15 hits for the first part of the quotation, and Yahoo search turns up even fewer. But it's a great quote.
Here it is. Crack the code, read the quote, then try to guess who said it.
“Go wet Go’be bain zaxwniserosn ruexd Camphernia. Un fdwro hexrnpa ra rdixt run zmazye kezyn ra hunxo runin hewn xa woxzabn reva. Go hexra ra rdixt run zmazye kezyn ra hunxo lnalmn mosnpe foxo wbemmd sommecnwn sexpa raayt zein wajo ynezut larunie.”
All right. Now that you've
solved ignored tonight's Crypto-Gremlin, here's tonight's JulieCrostic.
Usual rules apply. Figure out the answers to the clues and fill them into a grid. (See Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up for examples of what the grids look like.) Each answer in a row has all the letters of the previous answer in that row plus one new letter. Write the new letters in the spaces between words and these will for vertical columns which spell out a message -- in this case the title of a classic mystery novel.
Usual warnings apply as well: (1) The puzzle gremlins have bundled all the clues into tidy little groups of 3, regardless of how many answers there actually are to the rows in the puzzle. (If the number didn't divide evenly by 3 they added blank clues to make it come out.) (2) The puzzle gremlins have removed the capitalization so you'll need to provide your own. (3) Occasionally the puzzle gremlins fiddle with clue punctuation -- removing marks which should be there or adding ones which shouldn't -- so you may need to alter punctuation in order to make a clue read properly.
1. dollar or pound
2. like a butterfly follower
3. put to sleep with a lullaby, for instance
4. entertaining guests
5. eggs
6. paper and wheat
7. way of the gods
8. experiences sexual advances
9. madonna precursor
10. controversial mayor
11. like a trash can, but mobile, hostile and prone to verbal repetition
12. in an unclothed manner
13. graham
14. charlie and jackie
15. bake a cherry pie next
16. phil ochs song
17. this is your cule clue
18. true companion
19. place where you receive karma
20. appeared in brave and the bold # 93
21. virginia, california, and a place to find jesus