Christopher M. Maslanka (born 27 October 1954) is a British writer and broadcaster, specialising in puzzles and problem solving.
He was educated at The Becket School, Nottingham, where he was a successful chess player, and went on to study physics at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
His first book – The Pyrgic Puzzler – a collection of 80 puzzles with illustrations by Michael Harrington, was written without any particular view to publication, but was taken up by Iris Murdoch who wrote an introduction for it in which she said that although she's not a great solver of puzzles, the book may be 'read as literature' just as in the case of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Bible.
[1] A book interview with David Freeman at BBC Radio Oxford led to Maslanka's contributing anecdotes and puzzles to many programmes and in 1992-3 he co-hosted the Saturday afternoon show PDQ 95.2 with Andrew Peach.
He was also invited by the World Service to broadcast his humorous puzzle anecdotes to the hostages during the Gulf War.