Solution to Evan Birnholzs Oct. 29 crossword, Ghostwriters
Special thanks to my readers for your lovely notes about last week’s crossword. My wife and I both greatly appreciated your kind words welcoming our son Elliot to the world. Who can say if he’ll become a solver or a constructor like his dad, but I’m already giddy with anticipation for the day that I can show him that puzzle — my little gift to him.
Today’s Halloween puzzle is a rerun from almost exactly five years ago. I had started to build a new Halloween puzzle a couple of weeks ago … but as I was working on the grid, my wife and I found out our son would be arriving very soon — much earlier than our expected due date. So I had to shelve the new puzzle and bring back a Halloween puzzle from the past.
You can read the original October 2018 blog post about “Ghostwriters” here, but as a recap:
- Six starred answers contain the names of authors that you must skip over in both directions for the clues to make sense. For instance, 23A: [*Free, as a car after a snowstorm] is a clue for DIG OUT, but the author Anais NIN is hiding on the inside to make it DINING OUT. Crossing the invisible NIN are ORATE (3D: [Make a delivery to many people]), RON (24D: [“Inferno” director Howard]), and MAE (4D: [West of Hollywood]), though they appear in the grid as ORNATE, IRON, and MANE.
- The other tricky starred answers are COMPOUNDING, ECOSYSTEMS, GORGONZOLA, BEWILDERING, and STRANDING, secretly containing the invisible authors Ezra POUND, Umberto ECO, Emile ZOLA, Oscar WILDE, and Ayn RAND.
- All six authors can be found elsewhere in the grid (highlighted in the green squares above), clued as though they are “ghost” writers. You can then use those six names to infer where they appear in the starred answers, creating legitimate crossing words in both directions.
If this was your first time solving this puzzle, I hope you enjoyed its tricks; and if it was your second time, I hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Next week’s puzzle will be the first of nine guest crosswords in The Washington Post. You’re in for a treat.
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