He's got all the answers

BRUNSWICK, Maine -- "Eugene Maleska? You met him?" Michael Doran, steering his cart toward the 10th tee at the Brunswick Country Club, reacts as if his golfing companion had just revealed he'd once chatted up Elvis at Graceland. Doran stops the cart and grabs a club. "Wow," he says, surveying the open fairway. "That's really cool. I wish I had."

Suffice to say, not many 19-year-old college students -- Doran enters his sophomore year at Wheaton College this fall -- would recognize Maleska's name, much less envy having met the late crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times. To puzzle buffs of a certain age, though, Maleska (who died in 1993) is a godlike figure, no less a legend in his time and field than the King of Rock 'n' Roll himself.

And while Doran, who lives in nearby Topsham, was barely in grade school when Maleska published his final brainteaser in the Times, Doran's own accomplishments as a puzzle constructor make him a fitting heir to the Maleska tradition, a throwback to the days before GameBoys.

A budding journalist and four-handicap golfer, Doran has sold three puzzles to the Times already and another to the Los Angeles Times. During the school year, he also constructed puzzles for the biweekly campus newspaper and has been commissioned to design a special Wheaton-themed puzzle for an upcoming issue of the college alumni magazine. Such exploits as a cruciverbalist -- that would be a 14-letter answer to the clue "puzzle maker" -- have led to profiles of Doran on the college website and in his local newspaper, the Brunswick-based Times Record.

Geeky? Some might dismiss his hobby as such. Yet few would deny that the prestige of earning a Times byline -- and the modest $100 that goes with it -- is pretty impressive, especially when attached to a game of wits that appeals to fans of both wordplay and Coldplay. Or at least some of the latter.

"It's not really a younger generation kind of thing," Doran admits. "I probably get more kudos from faculty club members and guys at the golf club than I do from other students, but that doesn't bother me." His college pals "don't exactly look down on it," he adds, "but they don't get it, either. Probably because it's a dying art. I like the challenge, though."

Doran spends upward of 15 hours constructing puzzles such as the pun-oriented variety that ran in the LA Times last year: All keyword answers began with the prefix "para," so that the clue "two physicians" yielded the answer "paramedics." Still, he concedes that puzzle making does not have many practical applications beyond the sheer satisfaction of creating something challenging and fun.

"There's no real-world use to knowing a word like `anoa,' " Doran says, referring to one of those obscure, vowel-laden words that regularly crop up as puzzle answers (clue: small buffalo or wild ox). "Unless you count Scrabble, of course," he adds. How so? "Let's just say I'm on a long winning streak against my parents," he says with a shrug.

Clever constructions Will Shortz, Maleska's successor as The New York Times puzzle editor, says Doran is "right up with the best" of the younger constructors who submit puzzles to his paper.

"The competition is fierce," says Shortz, who receives eight to 10 submissions for every puzzle he accepts. "But Mike makes nearly perfect constructions."

Shortz, praising Doran's constructions for their cleverness, originality, and topicality, recalls his first successful Times submission, a daily puzzle built around three definitions for "Homer." One involved baseball and another the Greek author, but it was the third (answer: "Bart and Lisa's dad") that reflected a younger, more pop-culture-flavored sensibility, according to Shortz.

Doran is the fourth-youngest constructor to appear in the Times during Shortz's tenure. The youngest was 15 years old, the oldest 90. So far, it's been a happy, productive relationship between the college freshman and the puzzle editor who has become a mainstay on National Public Radio -- and a hero to cruciverbalists everywhere.

"It's easier once they know your name," Doran says. "They know that what you send has potential right from the start."

Maleska's taste in puzzles "was totally different from Will's," Doran continues. "Back when Eugene did them, the answers were all stuff you'd find in the dictionary. You'd never find colloquialisms like `dine in' or `eat out,' for instance."

Shortz agrees that today's puzzles involve more puns and wordplay as well as more topical references to pop stars, sports figures, and dot-com entities. "I think they're a perfect medium for younger people, who have short attention spans anyway," says Shortz, offering a counterargument to the puzzles-are-for-old-folks view.

`The maker's insight' Doran acquired his taste for crossword puzzles from his mother, a registered nurse. His father is a natural science educator with the Maine Department of Conservation. Doran's sister, 23, is a nurse also, while his brother, 21, recently finished a tour of duty in Iraq with the US Army.

As a kid, says Doran, he would notice the daily puzzle lying around the house and start filling in the grids. He began with the Monday and Tuesday puzzles, usually the easiest of the week's offerings. (In The New York Times, at least, daily puzzles get progressively harder as the week unfolds.)

At Wheaton, where he's on full scholarship, Doran was encouraged to expand his talents by English professor Jayne Iafrate. Iafrate taught Doran last fall and serves as faculty adviser to the Wheaton Wire. A Pulitzer Prize-winning former editor at the LA Times, Iafrate was approached by Doran after class one day and casually asked whether the paper would be interested in running his puzzles.

"I said, `Of course,' " Iafrate recalls. "As a side note, Mike said he'd been published before. `Where?' I asked, figuring it must be some small-town newspaper. And he said, `Oh, The New York Times.' I was amazed."

For Doran, the architecture of any puzzle starts with his selecting a theme, followed by settling upon the longer, nonthematic entries that make up the basic scaffolding. Then he methodically fills in the rest of the 15-square-by-15-square grid with shorter words. A computer software program, Crossword Compiler, helps him fill in the tight spaces, but "puzzles can't really be made by a computer," Doran points out. "You need the maker's insight."

Shortz seconds that motion. "No one can push a button and create a crossword puzzle," says Shortz. "The human touch -- giving good, fresh clues -- is a big part of the process."

Doran likens finding a theme to a light bulb going off. Something clicks, and his imagination is immediately engaged. "I make puzzles I want to solve myself, in a sense," he says.

Never was that more true than the day Doran was tackling The New York Times's puzzle last fall and was surprised how easily the first couple of answers came to him. When he looked at the page more closely, he noticed his name on the puzzle. For a constructor, particularly a young one, it was the ultimate rush.

Ironically, Doran struggles with the Times's Sunday puzzle, which is larger and more thematically complex than the daily variety.

"At this point, I'm a better constructor than I am solver," he says with a slightly sheepish grin. "Ballet stars, gymnasts, actors from the '70s -- I don't know any of that stuff."

He'll learn, one suspects.

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.