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Letter From the Archive: Burkhard Bilger’s Adventures

When I was small, some of my favorite books were the Tom Swift stories, by Victor Appleton II (the nom de plume of Edward Stratemeyer, the children’s-books magnate). In each novel, Tom, a boy genius who was “Swift by name and swift by nature,” would invent some miraculous new gizmo. At the same time, he’d fall into an adventure: exploring the oceans, for example, in “Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter,” or journeying to the center of the Earth in “Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster.” Tom lived what I felt must be the perfect life: half in the lab, half “in the field,” either building things or blowing them up.

Many of Burkhard Bilger’s stories for The New Yorker proceed in the same giddy, Tom Swiftian spirit—and they have the virtue of being a hundred per cent true. Earlier this year, in an article called “The Martian Chronicles,” Bilger wrote a spellbinding account of the struggle to design the Curiosity rover. He’s written about single-minded stove inventors; about the huge earth-chomping machines used to create tunnels; about high-altitude skydivers, spider experts, and heroic, ingenious police dogs. He writes about people with extraordinary skills: a nun who makes fantastic cheese, or the world’s best short-order egg cooks. These great stories are available to subscribers only, but two of my favorite Bilger stories are unlocked for non-subscribers, too. “A Better Brew,” from 2008, is about the beer obsessives at Dogfish Brewery, and their efforts to create an “extreme beer.” And “The Riddler,” from 2002, is about Henry Hook, a crossword-puzzle designer who is “the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world”:

When Henry Hook was fourteen years old, living in East Rutherford, New Jersey, his grandmother gave him a crossword jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. Designed by Eugene T. Maleska, who became a legendary editor of the Times crossword, the puzzle had three parts. First, you had to solve the crossword puzzle on paper; then you had to fit the jigsaw pieces together in order to verify your answers. When you were done, if you looked carefully you could find a secret message zigzagging through the answers: “YOU HAVE JUST FINISHED THE WORLD’S MOST REMARKABLE CROSSWORD.” Hook was less than impressed. Within a matter of days, he sent a rebuttal puzzle to Maleska. It contained a hidden message of its own: “WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOUR PUZZLE IS MORE REMARKABLE THAN MINE?”

Bilger joins Hook and other élite puzzlers—a “crossword virtuoso,” a writer for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”—on a midnight scavenger hunt across Manhattan. It’s not quite a journey to the center of the Earth in an Atomic Earth Blaster, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.