I live in a family of puzzle lovers. My father filled out the newspaper crossword seven days a week. In ink. He passed along his obsession to both Andrew and Claire. When we gifted them a games subscription to the New York Times so that they could solve the puzzles online, you would have thought we opened up a bank vault. We still hold on to the Sunday magazine so Andrew can solve the puzzle in the hard copy format. Yes, in ink. Candice has long loved jigsaw puzzles, and we can count on one or more coming out over the holidays or on vacation. The entire family plays Wordle, posting our daily results to a family text thread, while Claire and Candice also play Connections. Candice and Andrew are big Sudoku fans. In retirement, I’ve become absorbed in the special puzzles that are murder mysteries.

Morning is “puzzle time” at our house. Whatever the number at home, we usually arrive at the breakfast table at very different times. Nonetheless, out will come the paper and pen, phone, or tablet. I’m generally first and I usually tackle mine over coffee, fruit, and eggs. That meal, along with the day’s puzzle and news, is what I think of when I think of breakfast.

“There was something about the ritual of a leisurely morning feast—and especially eggs, which Pippa had always thought of as brain food—that made the heart lift.

As far as she was concerned, it was something people didn’t do enough of: to take a few moments to yourself, when your mind was at its clearest. To reflect on the endless possibilities of the day stretched before you. To spoil yourself before the world spoiled you. She swore by it.“

The Pippa in this excerpt is Miss Pippa Allsbrook: polymath, a professional enthusiast of crossword puzzles, creator of The Sunday Times puzzles using the pseudonym Squire to conceal her gender, and—most importantly—Chief Cruciverbalist, Founder and President of The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers. She is one of thirteen members of the Fellowship who live together in her historic family estate, Creighton Hall, in the English countryside.

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers (2024) by Samuel Burr is a delightful tale of a group of extraordinary minds who live unusual lives. Besides Pippa you have Earl Vosey, the handsome Master of Mazes who conceives and executes his designs at English country houses. Jean Watkins is the Chief Trivialist while Geoff Stirrup, a former accountant, is the Fellowship’s Lead Arithmetician. Miss Nancy Stone—the London cabdriver with a photographic memory—is the Queen of Quizzes. The grumpy Eric Stoppard is Minister for Mechanical Puzzles, while Jonty Entwhistle serves as Wordsmith and Riddler. The sometimes-troubled Hector Haywood is the Jigsaw Artist and Deputy President while Angel Webster is the group’s housekeeper who came along with the property when Pippa bought it to return it to her family and provide the group a home. The youngest member, Clayton Stumper, serves as the Club Secretary and Estate Manager. His name is especially appropriate since he arrived as a baby on Creighton Hall’s front stoop, nestled in a hatbox with no parents in sight.

Throughout this uplifting debut novel, the cast of characters moves through the many puzzles put before them with a focus on the Fellowship’s motto: VENI, VIDI, SOLVI (I CAME, I SAW, I SOLVED). And the book is full of crosswords, Caesar shifts, anagrams, codes, mazes, and other puzzle delights.

Burr takes all manner of stories and weaves them together in a way that keeps you turning the page. Each chapter covers a different period, from the founding of the Fellowship in the upper room of a London pub to Pippa’s funeral at Creighton Hall and Clayton’s subsequent quest to solve her final puzzle and learn the truth about his life, past and future.

It is that final story that makes the book so endearing. Clayton is twenty-five when Pippa—the only mother he’s ever known—dies and leaves him with a series of clues to uncover. This quest will “require a passport” as he learns at the earliest stage of his discovery. He may be in his twenties, but “he dresses like your grandad and drinks sherry like your aunt.” Raised by Pippa and the “sharpest minds in the British Isles,” he now “finds himself amongst the last survivors of a fading institution.”

Clayton’s discoveries are interspersed with earlier scenes that provide the backstory to his coming to the Fellowship and to his search. It is all told in such a kind, warm, even elegant way that you can’t help but love the characters and be sorry that you must leave them behind when you reach the final page. Burr is “cryptic yet uplifting” in his writing.

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers is ultimately about the puzzle each of us faces to belong, to find our own missing pieces, to discover who we really are. Of course life is not really a puzzle, but a mystery. In Radical Uncertainty, Mervyn King and John Kay draw a distinction between two kinds of problems: puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles are relatively easy. Mysteries, loosely defined problems with radically uncertain outcomes, are hard. Unfortunately, many humans “think we know the answer to questions that are fundamentally unknowable” because they treat mysteries as puzzles. “And that produces hubristic decision-making.”

Burr recognizes that in solving Pippa’s puzzles, Clayton will answer some knowable questions (who were my birth parents) but only get a glimpse of how to live going forward within life’s mysteries. Along the way, all the characters learn that “to go further, go together.” It is a favorite saying of Pippa’s, yet even she has to relearn that important lesson again and again.

Life isn’t always straightforward for this cast of misfits, but as Pippi is fond of saying, “nothing worth solving ever is.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Jigsaw puzzle photo by Gokhan Polat on Unsplash