Book Review | The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers #booksky

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers caught my eye when I returned The Life of Pi to the library. Dangerous, going into a library: you never know what you might come out with! I confess the other two went back without being read. This one slipped in between others that had publishing deadlines.

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers

by Samuel Burr

Sometimes finding your place in the world is the greatest puzzle of all…

Clayton Stumper is an enigma.

He might be twenty-five years old, but he dresses like your grandad and drinks sherry like your aunt.

Abandoned at birth on the steps of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, he was raised by the sharpest minds in the British Isles and finds himself amongst the last survivors of a fading institution.

When the esteemed crossword compiler, Pippa Allsbrook, passes away, she bestows her final puzzle to him: a promise to reveal the mystery of his parentage and prepare him for his future.

Yet as Clay begins to unpick the clues, he uncovers something even the Fellowship have never been able to solve – and it’s a secret that will change everything… (goodreads)

My Review

When I finished this book, I didn’t think I was going to review it. I didn’t even mark it as read on my Goodreads list (I hadn’t marked it as currently reading, either.) Maybe it slipped between two other excellent books, and I felt it was over-rated. But thinking back — it’s good, and deserves recognition!

The premise of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers is excellent. A society of people dedicated to making (and solving) puzzles of all type does not exist. Partly because puzzlemakers tend towards the more introverted, cerebral types — except perhaps those who develop more practical puzzles like boxes and jigsaws… So we start at the foundation of the society, with its inaugural meeting above a London pub. An odd bunch of people have been drawn together by a suitably puzzling small ad. At which point most of the puzzlemakers are astounded that one of the principal and most respected crossword compilers is not only suggesting the society, but is… a woman!! So this is set in London in the 1980s. Yes, it was still strange then to find women in senior positions. Memories of being the only woman in a meeting of 500 senior managers swam back into my brain.

But then we hopped forward a few years, and found the puzzlemakers in a country house, where a baby was left on the doorstep. And was taken in and raised joyfully. And we switch between the funeral of the lead puzzlemaker and the now young man who was taken in, and the progress of the society from its founding in the pub. We swap timelines sometimes confusingly, which is, I think, why I was reluctant to review for a while.

to puzzle or read?

Although its timeline may be confusing, the story is not. There are lovely details, and beautiful piece of plot development. There’s quite a bit of perpetrator guesswork. It’s billed as a novel, but written as a mystery, with plenty of puzzles thrown in. These could be irritating, if you wanted to get on with reading it but were offered a cryptic or coded clue to decipher. What a dilemma, puzzle or plot?

It has some faults but, like most good puzzles, you can’t put it down without continuing to work on the solution. The answer isn’t obvious, although it’s not very well hidden, so it probably is just about right. No deus ex machina to spoil the fun. And plenty of accurate details from both present day and those heady days of the late twentieth century!

An enjoyable read, especially for people of a certain age. Henlit for mystery fans, perhaps?