Mystery of McGuffin Manor / SUN 5-24-20 / Sprint competitor / Tech debut of 1998 / Hungry game characters / Style for Edward Hopper George Bellows / Music to hitchhiker's ears / Big launch of 1957 / Leader whose name means literally commander

Constructor: Andrew Chaikin

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (9-something to fill grid in correctly ... then 5 minutes to read the novel-length notes that were way way way way way less interesting than any novel I've ever read (and I read a *lot* of mysteries) ... then 10 minutes to grumble about how there's no way I'm gonna take the time to figure this stupid thing out ... then about two minutes to figure it out (once I actually sat down with the "Notes" and the grid, ugh)

"This crossword contains a whodunit: "Thank you for coming, Inspector," said Lady McGuffin. "The famed McGuffin Diamond has been stolen from my study! The eight members of the staff had a costume party tonight--it has to be one of them: the butler, driver, cook, baker, page, porter, barber or carpenter. They have all been confined to their respective rooms around the parlor [center of the grid]." Can you determine who stole the diamond ... and where it is now? // In the print version of this puzzle, nine sections of the grid are shaded: most of the central area, and eight large regions surrounding the center--the upper left, upper middle, upper right, middle left, middle right, lower left, lower middle and lower right."

THEME:"The Mystery of McGuffin Manor" — a mystery puzzle involving the theft of a diamond ... read the above "Notes" and then follow the weird-ass "clues" in the grid and then solve the mystery, I guess:

Theme answers:

• As you inspect each room, you find staff members dressed as APTLY NAMED CELEBRITIES (25A)
• They're all WEARING NAME TAGS, so you can easily identify them (39A)
• In the study, you find that the thief accidentally left behind an APPLE SWEATSHIRT (85A)
• "You caught me!," says the thief, who then admits: "The diamond isn't here in my room, but it's hidden in THE ONE TO THE WEST OF HERE" (102A)

Soooooo..... the "staff members" / suspects described in the Puzzle Notes (i.e. the butler, driver, cook, baker, page, porter, barber or carpenter) are all actually last names of celebrities, who are clued as [Suspect #1] thru [Suspect #8]. So [Suspect #1] (28A) is COLE so that's COLE"porter," [Suspect #2] (50A) is GERARD so that's GERARD Butler, etc. Annnnnnyway, the "cook" is Apple CEO TIM Cook (65A: Suspect #3), and since the thief left behind an APPLE SWEATSHIRT (sidenote: I cannot get over how dumb a theme answer that is), we can assume that TIM Cook is the thief, and since he left the diamond not in his own "room," but in THE ONE TO THE WEST OF HERE (sidenote: seriously, wtf with these themers...), we should look not in the section where TIM is (the east) but to the "room" west of there (i.e. the "parlor," or middle section), and there you will find the McGuffin Diamond, in that you will find MCGUFFIN spelled out in diamond shape, starting with the "M" at the end of SUM (63A) and proceeding clockwise through all the letters adjacent to the little black "+" sign at the center of the grid:

• ELLEN Page (10D)
• TIKI Barber (13D)
• TIM Cook (guilty!) (65A)
• CHET Baker (101A)
• KAREN Carpenter (115A)
• MINNIE Driver (114A)
• GERARD Butler (50A)
• COLE Porter (28A)

Word of the Day: SEA ROOM (81D: Space to maneuver a ship) —

n.

Unobstructed space at sea adequate for maneuvering a ship.

NOTE: THERE WAS A PRINTING ERRORin the Sunday Magazine version of this puzzle (digital versions unaffected):


OK, so, see, the thing about mysteries is that there is a narrative. Characters are developed. Their identities, jobs, behavior, all that matters. If they're well written, you get invested, even when you know the plot is contrived. There's ... story. A reason to care. There's ... something. As opposed to this puzzle, where there is nothing. This is a nothing. It's not even a good parody, in that it doesn't seem to understand the terms of what it's parodying. First of all, here's the wikipedia definition of McGuffin: "In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself." But here the alleged McGuffin is all that there is. It is the central visual motif. It is the opposite of a McGuffin. In a real mystery, the McGuffin is the thing everyone's chasing so that The Story Can Be Propelled Forward And We Can Learn Things About The Characters. The "characters" here ... are totally irrelevant. TIKI Barber ... sits there. In ... what room is that? Oh, that's the other thing: does this puzzle think it's modeled on the board game "Clue"???! Because the whole "room" thing is totally "Clue" ... and yet in "Clue" there is a murder ("so and so, with the such and such weapon, in the something room," you might guess). Here', there's just a dumb theft. And a .... sweatshirt, was it? Sweatshirt!?!? What in the godawful arbitrary hell is that? It could have been APPLE [anything] but we get ... sweatshirt? And what does WEARING NAME TAGS even mean? Is that just a reference to the fact that the *first* names of the "celebrities" are what appear in the grid? But you already told us that with APTLY NAMED CELEBRITIES, so this WEARING NAME TAGS thing is a ridiculous redundancy. This puzzle manages to ruin crosswords and mysteries, two things I love, simultaneously. I guess that after four (4!) good puzzles in a row, we were due for a regression toward the mean. A hard regression.


It would be cool if the SEA ROOM were just a room in your house that was filled with sea water and like a kelp forest. "What's behind this door?""NOOOoo don't open that!" But instead it's this dumb thing about room for ship maneuvering. Somehow SEA ROOM got in with SEAWEED already present (44D: Major source of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere). Weird. The grid itself ... I mean, there it is! Not much to like or dislike. The only thing I particularly like is the HYMN / FUNK juxtaposition, mostly because it sounds like a cool new genre of religious music. That's SUM FAR out HYMN FUNK, man""It's actually ASIAN HYMN FUNK, man""Whoa ... well turn it up, man." See, I'm inventing dialogue for this damn novel because it hasn't got any. With THE USA, I believe we have had definite article answers in roughly 93.2% of May puzzles (93D: Springsteen's birthplace, in song). The hardest I laughed was when I had CUN- and had not yet looked at the clue, and the most I was confused was by RACER, until finally I realized Sprint was an actual race, not the telecom (7A: Sprint competitor). Here's a good name for a mystery: "ENTER O for 'Omicide" (16D: Intestinal: Prefix). It's like "Dial M for Murder" but dumber. OK bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]