Solution to Evan Birnholz’s Feb. 28 Post Magazine crossword, “Subtext”

And then there’s the not-exactly-subtle hint at 113A: [Subtext] which is UNDERLYING MESSAGE. The first step is to notice that those five theme answers above contain the names of novels written by those authors. It may take some Googling to confirm them, but here they are:

Put all of those letters together, and you get THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER by Tom Clancy. That’s a book that prominently features a submarine, so it’s literally a sub text.

Puzzles that involve stacking theme answers on top of one another always give me a certain amount of stress. This one was an example where I finished with something that was way, way less stressful than it was in the beginning. I spent a day trying to make the meta answer TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA by Jules Verne. It just wouldn’t happen; it’s 32 letters long, which was too many for stacking other novel titles on top of them. I got closer than I thought I would, but it involved too many grid compromises for my taste. Even working with an enlarged grid didn’t work, and this one was slightly larger than normal (21×22 squares) on its own. As always, it’s good to remember is that sometimes less is more.