Henry Hook, 60, one of the team of crossword creators responsible for the weekly puzzle in these pages, died Oct. 27.
An article in The Boston Globe, where these puzzles originally appear, quotes an email from Hook's colleagues, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon: “He had been ill with diabetes, and underwent a surgery this summer from which he had a troubled recovery.''
For a number of years, the trio has also made the puzzle available electronically by subscription to readers as CRooked Crosswords.
In The New Yorker in 2002, Burkhard Bilger described Hook, who lived in Brooklyn, as “a brilliant and oddly beloved misanthrope, administering exquisite torture through dozens of puzzle books and syndicated crosswords.”
“His career has been one long effort to subvert our safe assumptions about puzzles, to make them as unsettling and unpredictable as art,” he wrote.
Our condolences to his colleagues and to the cruciverbalists who loved and appreciated his work.