NEW YORK — Merl Reagle, a playfully irreverent crossword puzzle constructor whose clues set off spirited cerebrations from fans rather than frustrated surrenders to dictionary arcana, died Saturday in Tampa. He was 65. The cause was complications of pancreatitis.
“Many of today’s top constructors, in fact, got their inspiration from him,” his friend Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times, said on Wordplay, the crossword blog on nytimes.com. In an interview, he added, “His puzzles were genuinely funnier than anybody else’s, and he was an expert interlocker.”
Mr. Reagle started creating crossword puzzles when he was 6. (“The English language was the best toy a boy ever had,” he said.) At the urging of his high school English teacher in 1967, when he was barely 17, he became the youngest person to sell one to The Times — for $10.
Although his record was broken two years later, he followed advice by puzzle editor Margaret P. Farrar, who wrote to him that above all, crosswords should be entertaining.
“In the 1980s, a new group of puzzle makers saw that crosswords were starting to remind them of their worst teachers from grade school,” Mr. Reagle wrote in a 1997 article for The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday magazine. “Wouldn’t it be more fun and attract more solvers if puzzles were a little more playful? Just a smidge trickier and a lot wittier?”
According to Shortz, “Incredibly, The Times’ editor, Eugene T. Maleska, had written Merl that he had no talent.”
Readers disagreed.
Mr. Reagle would go on to contribute devilishly inventive puzzles to The Times and to create them regularly for The Washington Post Magazine and The Los Angeles Times, as well as syndicating them.
He was featured in “Wordplay,” a 2006 documentary about the Times puzzle and its devotees (revealing, among other trade secrets, why he did not use descriptive terms for bodily functions as answers).
The appearances by Mr. Reagle and Shortz inspired cameos, in cartoon form, in a 2008 episode of “The Simpsons,” “Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words,” in which Lisa solves a puzzle that was published in that Sunday’s Times.
Mr. Reagle’s signature clues were more likely to be inscrutable brain-twisting puns or anagrams than recondite factoids. The answer to “completely” was “atoz” (think a-to-z).
One puzzle had the theme of movie titles with missing letters. For “ ‘Empire of the Ants’ co-feature,” the answer was “Lice in Wonderland.” For one focused on punny surnames, the clue was “Golfer who invented the all-plastic club.” The answer: “Arnold Polymer.”
Merl Harry Reagle was born in Audubon, N.J.
He attended the University of Arizona and was a copy editor for the campus newspaper. After dropping out credits short of an English degree, he worked as a copy editor at The Arizona Daily Star before moving to Santa Monica, Calif., where he wrote for game shows.
In 1979, he began making crossword puzzles full time, at first weekly for The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle.
Mr. Reagle leaves his wife, Marie Haley, his father, and his brother.
As one of the few full-time crossword puzzle craftsmen (he only recently began using a computer program for incidental words), Mr. Reagle recognized that he fulfilled multiple roles, among them wisecracker, provocateur, and tease.
“There’s a fine line,” he acknowledged, “between entertainment and torture.”