I swear that I came up with this puzzle well before the Mystery Hunt organizers revealed this year’s theme. In each answer, the first word is the name of a song from a famous Broadway musical. If you take the nth letter of that musical, where n is the number of letters in the second word, the resulting letters spell out SONDHEIM.
| Puzzle Name | Answer | Musical |
| A scientific calculator | ONE PERCENT | A Chorus Line |
| A globe | HELLO WORLD | The Book of Mormon |
| A Valentine’s Day card | HEART RATE | Damn Yankees |
| A how-to-dance manual | CONGA LINE | Wonderful Town |
| A newspaper | AGONY COLUMN | Into The Woods |
| A blueprint | SIMPLE PLAN | Nine |
| A textbook | CLASS ACT | Chicago |
| A sewing machine | SCRAP MATERIAL | The Full Monty |
It was noted that “Simple” is in fact a song in two different musicals — Nine and Anyone Can Whistle. I hadn’t realized this, but I doubt that little glitch would have gotten in anybody’s way once they discovered where this puzzle was going.
Why do books have typos?
It’s happened to all of us: We’re reading a book, we’re involved with the story, and then we’re jerked back to reality by an idiotic typo. How did nobody catch this?, we ask ourselves. Didn’t these people read their own book? Come on, guys! Find some professionalism! Take some pride in your work!
I still shake my head at some of the stuff that makes it into print — even from where I stand, some of these errors seem glaring — but now that I’ve been through the process a few times, I understand why it happens.
In my folder full of Word documents, I have ten different versions of the book that will soon be released as The Puzzler’s Mansion. Way back at the beginning of the timeline, in one of the earliest drafts, I wrote the following sentence: “He spied a first-aid kid and began rooting through it.”
That’s right: A first-aid kid. (Or did you miss that?) Apparently in Winston’s world, the entrails of baby goats have curative properties. You just slice one open, root around in there for a bit, and your wounds are as good as healed.
I’m not sure I can even calculate the number of times this sentence has been read over the past couple of years. I myself must have read it a hundred times in the course of writing and re-writing. The completed manuscript then had a number of test readers. My editor and I passed it back and forth a dozen times, and along the way, it also faced a copyeditor and a proofreader. The sentence survived every pass. The galleys were bound into “Advance Reading Copies,” and sent out to critics and booksellers. I also gave ARCs to two entirely new test readers. These new eyes resulted in a ton of excellent notes, including an error in a puzzle that had gotten by everybody. But the first-aid kid stayed hidden in plain sight.
The editing process continued through two more passes, including a second copyediting. After each pass, I would read the book again, in an increasingly heightened state of paranoia because I hate the idea of typos getting into my books. And STILL the first-aid kid lived on.
The whole shebang just had one last absolutely final proofreading pass, and a handful of changes were sent my way for review. Mostly these were commas that had been inserted and deleted multiple times over the last couple of years: Person A thinks a comma should be there, Person B disagrees and removes it, Person C puts it back in, and so on. On any given comma, I don’t remember what my original opinion was, nor do I have any idea how I feel about it now. We can go with majority rule!
But lo and behold, what else does the proofreader find but a first-aid kid. And not only that: She also read the sentence, “He raised a finger and pointed it Winston’s chest,” and saw the missing at that everybody else had skipped over. This book had been scoured so many times, including by me on readings where I am specifically looking for errors of this nature… and two errors are caught only at the very last second, pretty much as the book is going out the door to the printer.
Which means there’s something else in there. Somewhere. Some ridiculous mistake that I’ll probably spot thirty seconds after the hardbound books arrive on my doorstep. Well, I can always make a correction in the paperback.