A few months back, my good friend Bill Heine (he of the shark house and BBC Radio Oxford) had lunch. Bill double-booked me with another friend of his, Chris Maslanka, a top puzzlist who writes the puzzles for the Guardian and The Oxford Times.
Oxford being so tiny, the degrees of separation are usually 2. It wasn’t much of a surprise to Chris and I to learn that we were connected through St Catherine’s College, also my own wonderful literary agent. And Bill.
Bill has turned interviewing me into a sport – you can listen to some of our previous encounters on my interviews page.
Anyway, thanks to Bill I made a new friend. Chris and his evil twin, Mikhail, proved to be great allies when I needed a way to visualise some of the puzzles in the first three books of “The Joshua Files”. Code-cracking workshops are now part of my school-visit repertoire…it’s surprising what you learn to do as a children’s author!
‘Mikhail’ Maslanka provides the solutions to all the puzzles in extended videos on the Joshua Files puzzles page at themgharris.com
And in this week’s Guardian puzzles, you can find the first in an exclusive series of Joshua-themed puzzles!
Solution in next week’s paper…
I’ll update this blog entry to include the puzzle after publication.
Btw Mikhail isn’t so much evil as eccentric. Chris is very normal though, a rum-tee-tum sort of fellow.
One reply on “Decoding Joshua, with Chris Maslanka”
Funny, that. I’m working on a puzzle – more a code within text that no-one has noticed until…
I’m doing my usual: I can’t sleep, so I’m looking at everything again! There’s gotta be a movie, surely – Josh’s adventures are made for it. An animated one, at least.
Just pointing the way, Most Glamorous lol
Es x