I Love Crosswords

Puzzle Man: How Myles Mellor Made Crosswords a Career

By Myles Dannhausen Jr., Peninsula Pulse – 

September 3rd, 2020

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Myles Mellor has published more than 16,000 crossword puzzles, including the weekly puzzle in the “Peninsula Pulse.” Submitted.

Puzzle creator Myles Mellor didn’t set out to craft a new career when he first sketched a crossword puzzle by hand 20 years ago. He was simply trying to cheer up his dad back home in England. 

“My mom died, and my father was quite devastated by it, and I was trying to think of a way I could make life better for him and cheer him up,” said Mellor, who was born and raised in Oxford, England. 

His father loved doing puzzles, so Mellor started sending them to him. After receiving several, his father suggested he get them published. Mellor sent a few dozen unsuccessful queries before getting some assistance from David Hoyt, one of the world’s top puzzle creators. 

Hoyt’s first piece of advice was to stop writing them by hand and start using puzzle-creation software. 

“I didn’t even know that existed,” Mellor said. 

Eventually he sold his first puzzle to 9-1-1 Magazine, an industry publication for the emergency communications and response industry. Now he’s published more than 16,000 crossword puzzles, including the weekly puzzle in the Peninsula Pulse, which is on the more difficult end of the spectrum of puzzles that he creates. 

It can take anywhere from an hour to half a day for Mellor to finish writing a puzzle. The difficulty comes from both the size and the phrasing of the clues. 

“It’s all about the level of difficulty you want to have,” he said. “You can make a puzzle easy by just using the definition of a word, or you can make it more difficult by using a cultural reference or something more subtle that might relate to the word. But I do try to include some easier ones so it’s solvable. I think about who the people are who are going to be trying to solve this.”

Mellor still loves the discovery and learning that come with crosswords, and he said there has been greater demand since the onset of COVID-19.

“It’s a peaceful challenge at a time when the world is anything but,” he said. “If you’re there with a crossword puzzle and a cup of coffee, it’s peaceful.”

Learn more about Myles Mellor on the Door County Pulse Podcast episode “How Myles Mellor Made Crosswords His Career.”

By Adam Bradley for Coast News newspaper

Updated by Myles Mellor, Nov 17 2023

Carlsbad’s King of Crossword Puzzles Not Slowing Down

Myles Mellor, 72, is one of the top crossword puzzle writers on the planet.

In the world of crossword puzzles, Myles Mellor is one of the kings, but not in the way you might be thinking.

The 72-year-old Carlsbad resident is one of the top crossword puzzle writers on the planet. During his 15-year career he has had 18,000 published puzzles appear in more than 600 magazines, newspapers, and web outlets around the world. Known for supplying theme crosswords, diamond crosswords, syndicated puzzles, cryptograms, diagramless crosswords, word search, sudokus, anagrams, and word games, he’s not about to stop anytime soon.

And why should he, he loves what he does.

 “It’s a great life to do what I love, and I make a good living from it,” said the United Kingdom native. “I think what sets my crossword puzzles apart is the fact that they are solvable. I try to write things that people can solve without a too much effort.”

He also makes sure that he does his homework for each crossword puzzle that he writes whether it’s for a fashion magazine or a tax publication.

“I always do the research about the subject before I start working and creating a crossword puzzle,” he said. “It’s important that I know about the subject to write a good puzzle.”

What’s Old Is New

If you thought crosswords were a thing of the past like 8-track cassette players and vinyl records, guess again. Even young people are doing crossword puzzles in the most unlikely places, Mellor said.

“People think that crosswords are only for older people,” he laughed.  “I don’t think so at all. According to New York Times editor, Will Shortz, there are over 50 million people solving crosswords in the USA. There are probably 2 million playing different crossword apps. So, yes, young people do use their phones and play crosswords on them.”

That said, crossword puzzles are perhaps just as popular as they have always been and have stood the test of time. Maybe more so than any other puzzle game ever created.

“Crosswords are fun, relaxing and everyone does them,” he said. “The world of crosswords just keeps getting bigger. I supply a lot of crosswords now to some of the top crossword apps. There is a huge demand. Both for print and online puzzles.”

Man, Behind the Puzzles

Born and raised in Oxford, England, Mellor lived in Newbury and Canterbury. He was educated at a private school in north Wales and Bristol University.  Mellor moved to California in the 1970s “for the weather of course,” first stop the San Fernando Valley, then Glendale and finally in Carlsbad about a year ago.

However, before becoming a top crossword puzzle writer, Mellor was an executive in a printer sales company in Glendale. As for crosswords, back then they were nothing more than a hobby for Mellor, who says the full-time job of writing them followed.

As for his love of crossword puzzles, he attributes this to his dad, who served as the headmaster of a private school in England.  

 “My father taught me how to solve them at an early age,” he said. “Many years later, my mother died while I was here in the US. My dad was heartbroken, and I knew he loved crosswords, so I started writing some very amateurish crosswords for him to solve. He loved them and was very happy to get them. He would send me the solved crosswords,” he said.

“After three or four of them, he said they were pretty good and that I should try to publish them. That’s how it all started.”

Mellor said he spent 6 months writing crosswords and sending them out to syndicates and magazines. Nothing happened.

“I think the first one I wrote was about architecture. After about a year, I finally managed to break through thanks to a great friend of mine, David Hoyt (one of the top inventors of new puzzle brands in the world)” he said.

That was then, this is now. These days Mellor cranks out a lot of puzzles during any given week and this is no small feat as they do take time to create.

“Time varies a lot; newspaper puzzles are easier for me to make,” he said. “Custom theme crosswords could take 4 or 5 hours. Very large crosswords can take some days to do.”

Syndication

Incidentally, about one-third of Mellor’s business is via syndication, the rest of it is from books and custom work. Some of those include: MasterCard, Oracle, IBM, History Channel, Discover, Turner TV, Council on Foreign Relations, Costco, American Airlines, Singapore Air, Southwest Airlines, OECD, Blue Cross, TV Guide, and Harvard Law.

“The syndication really started when a newspaper publisher in Sonoma asked me to write puzzles for him as his paper was spending way too much,” he said. “He liked what I came up with and I’ve supplied his paper ever since; for about 10 years now.”

However, of all the crossword puzzles he writes he said he enjoys doing the personal puzzles the best for individuals and special occasions.

“People getting married, engagement parties, birthday celebrations, Anniversaries, etc. It’s so much fun to create some magic for people using their memories as the basis for a custom crossword puzzle,” he said.

Full Steam Ahead

As for the future of the crossword puzzle, Mellor said he doesn’t think they will ever go out of style.

“Crossword puzzles are here to stay,” he said. “People can do them anywhere, anytime, and any place, and they do.”

In addition to writing crossword puzzles, Mellor writes several other games/puzzles such as Sudoku, word search, cryptograms.

“Mainly these came about as I would get asked to do them and then found out how to do them and delivered them to clients. I love figuring things out,” he said.

Over time his puzzles have evolved thanks to time, technology and the like. 

“I’ve seen huge changes over the years,” he said. “I’ve had to become more understanding of different markets, what people need, what clients need and how to adapt to changing conditions.”

And if you are wondering if Mellor practices what he preaches, he does. He enjoys solving puzzles in other publications especially USA Today and the New York Times.

“I usually like to solve puzzles when I’m on a plane and I’ll do the USA Today one and the puzzles offered in the airline’s magazine. My wife Debby does all the sudokus.”

When he isn’t creating crossword puzzles, Mellor is into real estate investing, traveling to Europe, playing chess, word games, and is a handyman for his wife, Debby. They have two adult children, 36 and 40, and a cat named Penny.

You may contact Mellor via his website at www.mylesmellor.com  

Buy Myles’ crosswords at www.ilovecrosswords.com

Myles Mellor: The man who turned his puzzling hobby into booming crossword syndicate

Our own crossword puzzle man, British-born Myles Mellor, started a crossword business from scratch in 2006 and now is syndicated in over 600 magazines and newspapers around the world.

There are people who solve puzzles and then there are true puzzle people. Normal puzzle people peruse the news and ads in our weekly papers and reward themselves on the penultimate page with a trio of games preceding the classifieds. Myles Mellor, however, is the other kind of puzzle person.

Born and raised in Oxford, England, Mellor was raised alongside a brother and sister by his mother and father, who worked as a school principal. And those siblings became a doctor and a teacher, respectively, so there was no lack of brains in the family. He obviously inherited his fair share, graduating from Bristol and moving to the United States for an administrative job in real estate.

His family stayed in England, though, and when his mother died, his father, having shared the past fifty years of his life together with her was obviously very downcast and depressed. Mellor, far away in the United States, needed to find a way to cheer him up. A childhood memory of sitting on his father’s lap and “trying to solve the Guardian”, a London-based newspaper which according to Mellor is a pretty hard puzzle, sparked the idea to create his own puzzles to send to his dad.

It worked: his father’s mood improved significantly, and after receiving three or four of the homemade puzzles, his dad suggested that Mellor should publish them. As anyone knows, start-ups are tough, and so is getting your foot in the door with major publications. After zero responses in about six months of sending out letters and examples to syndicates and magazines, his girlfriend at the time advised him: “Don’t quit your day job.” But Mellor took the encouragement of his father over the realistic skepticism of his girlfriend, and contacted a gentleman named David Hoyt at the Orange County Register.

“One of the best and most prolific creators of puzzles in the United States,” Hoyt was a busy man, and asked Mellor to get back to him in three months, which he did. At that point, Hoyt disclosed that this is the answer is gives everyone that reaches out to him in that manner, and that Mellor was the only one who followed through. He suggested creating themed puzzles corresponding to specific magazines’ interests…and to get back to him again in another three months. Mellor followed his guidance, and in 2001, with some crossword software he found with Hoyt’s help, he managed to get a couple of puzzles published.

And that was the snowball that begat the avalanche, where the part-time hobby had, in three or so years, become a “big deal.” Big enough to abandon his job that he had moved to in an internet tech marketing company, marry that girl who told him not to quit that day job and went full time into puzzle creation in 2006.

Now, Mellor is syndicated and published in over six hundred magazines and newspapers, featured in sixty books, and recently started an online presence with Amazon. He estimates he’s created about 16,000 puzzles in his lifetime and publishes about 80 crosswords each month. It’s a lot to create, when a single puzzle can take from a few hours to a few days to produce. But Mellor is handsomely remunerated, and is able to make “a very good living” for him and his naysaying-girlfriend-now-wife, Debby, with whom he lives in Carlsbad, California, and is now his biggest fan. It is also the job to which everyone aspires, that which is enjoyable enough not to feel so much like work at all.

“Very few do what I do,” he states proudly, his favorite thing being the themed puzzles he creates, using the content of a publication to inform the clues and answers, or even custom puzzles fabricated from trivia provided by engaged couples, families and businesses. Crosswords will always be his favorite, but he also creates sudokus, cryptograms and word searches. Since his day job is most other peoples’ hobby, non-work related past times are few, although he does enjoy chess on the internet. He also claims he’s better at making the puzzles than solving them, but such humility is party of his charm. But he also knows “very few do what I do,” so you can expect to continue seeing Mellor’s puzzles in pretty much every format imaginable, from novelty books to national newspapers, online and in print, and right here in our own newspapers published by Straus Media.

Not one to rest on his laurels, he recently founded National Crossword Solved Day, which will be celebrated annually on December 8th.