When it comes to writing books, author Christopher J. Yates has a unique approach.
“My secret sauce for writing novels is I set to myself a puzzle I have to solve,” said Yates, who has published three novels and written for the puzzle pages of various publications — including The Post — for decades.
His new novel, “The Rabbit Club,” is a thriller set in academia. It exists in two time periods:1994, when wide-eyed 18-year-old Ali McCain arrives to study literature at Oxford University — and track down his English rock-star father — and 2019, when an unnamed academic in New York looks back on the events of Ali’s formative years.
“His voice just came to me, and I wrote like pages and pages of this crazy narrator. I was like, ‘Who is this guy? I have no idea.’ But I realized I had to solve the puzzle of who he was,” said Yates, a 53-year-old native of Kent, England, who now lives in the Hudson Valley. “When I worked it out, I was like, ‘No way, you can’t get away with that. You can’t pull it off.’ And then I was like, ‘What if I did it?’”
Yates’ earlier novels, 2015’s “Black Chalk” and 2018’s “Grist Mill Road,” had puzzles of their own.
“Black Chalk,” which is also set at Oxford, sees six students embroiled in a deadly game. The reader knows early on that one of them will die, but not which one.
“Grist Mill Road” takes place in a small New York town in the early 1980s. It starts with a teenage boy tying a young girl to a tree and shooting her with a BB gun, ultimately blinding her. The puzzle, Yates said, was figuring out why he did that.
“It could have been he’s a psychopath, but that wasn’t interesting to me,” he said.
Yates wrote about 80% of the book before the boy’s motive came to him.
“I was terrified, and I just walked into my kitchen to make some tea, and this overwhelming explosion of information occurred in my head. I had to stop moving. I just stared into the middle distance as all of the answers kind of came to my head,” he recalled. “I think it’s like, people who’ve done crosswords will often experience. You can stare at a crossword, you can’t get the last three answers, so you walk away, you do something else, you have some lunch, you come back, you look at the newspaper — and all of your answers just bang, bang, bang are in your head. I think your subconscious works it out for you.”
Yates started writing puzzles — in the traditional sense — at age 22.
After graduating from Oxford, where he studied law, in 1993, he couldn’t land a big job and took a six-week gig writing a database of crossword clues.
“That led to becoming a puzzle magazine editor and then editor of more important puzzle magazines,” he said.
In his early 20s, he even represented the United Kingdom at the World Puzzle Championship in Holland.
“That was the most surreal experience of my life,” he said. “Brilliant puzzle people aren’t necessary completely normal.“
He placed near the top in one of the rare word puzzles at the event, but most of the games involved math due to language differences. Overall, he was nearly last.
Yates currently creates the weekly Word Force game for The Post. Last year, he published, with co-writer Bruce Pitchers, his first puzzle book, “5 Minute Murder: 100 addictive crime mystery puzzles for logical sleuths.”
His fondness and aptitude for puzzles date back to childhood and visits to his paternal grandparents in London.
“They were literally Victorians and therefore never spoke to me and my sister,” he said. “They would just give us puzzle magazines and leave us in a room and occasionally take us for a walk to the park and serve us dinner.”
Yates, who begins most days playing the New York Times’ “Spelling Bee” game, is unsure if he has a natural knack for puzzles or just developed a skill for them while Grandpa smoked his pipe in the next room.
“It’s hard to know, isn’t it? Chicken or egg situation,” he said. “But I do think my strongest suit in life is words.”
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