Crossword puzzle fans are a loyal bunch and if something is amiss, they will let you know as soon as possible. When our puzzle was placed in the middle of the "Coffee Break" page and readers had a tough time working on it across the fold of the newspaper, we moved it to the top of the page daily and to the bottom of the page Sunday.

Some time and energy were spent looking into why the main puzzles — we also run New York Times crossword daily — had become progressively more difficult last week and why the Sunday puzzle had appeared in the previous week's Midweek.

The answer seemed simple enough when we dug up a February letter from Tribune Media Services, which said it would end syndication of the daily and Sunday crossword puzzles by Wayne Williams as of March 22 to be substituted with the Los Angeles Times Crossword.

Our use of the Los Angeles Times puzzle on Sunday answers the question as to why Midweek readers had already seen the puzzle the week before. Midweek subscribes to the L.A. Times puzzle and holds that contract, so it never should have been sent to us.

We will be presenting a new puzzle, called the Observer Crossword, starting today. Fair warning: Tribune claims it is a "mix of highbrow clues, tricky wordplay and obscure terms." The level of difficulty is very high.

Our daily puzzle ended up not being from the Times at all but something called the Daily Commuter by Jackie Mathews, who has been creating crosswords for more than 20 years and more recently, Sudoku.

Mathews, according to her biography, "tries to inject humor in some of her clues, rather than always being bound by dictionary definitions. As a crossword puzzle solver herself, she believes that funny and unusual clues make a puzzle much more enjoyable."

Early reviews of the puzzle have not been all that positive and several readers were baffled as to why they had become harder and the answers more obscure.

"This is very frustrating for me and a lot of my colleagues," wrote Richard Faria. "You gotta understand that some of us depend on a challenge to start our day. But the new crosswords are a morale killer. We like to have a little success during the day and the ability to finish a crossword is a big thing."

Faria said he could finish one or two puzzles a week but now can't even get get through one complete puzzle.

Reader Ken Stieha said he was away for two weeks, and when he resumed delivery of The Advertiser he couldn't believe what happened to the crossword puzzle.

"The puzzle has changed and the last several days, is at a much different level than in the past and is not as nearly as enjoyable or solvable," he wrote. "The April 1 puzzle included the number 8 in a number of the answers, which hasn't happened in the past and no notations or clues were given that this was the case."

He didn't care for the April 2 puzzle either, which he found too difficult. He wondered if we were purposely making the puzzles harder to see how readers would react and asked when they would return to a more manageable level.

Give the puzzles a few more weeks and let me know if they catch on or if you just feel like giving up. Or if they aren't challenging enough, move on to The New York Times Crossword at the bottom of the page.