The report for No. 42 is now complete.  And 43 is solved so will be blogged promptly.

But loonapick and I would still love to have one or two other Inquisitor solvers to help with blogging these puzzles.  Willingness to write about them is more important than confidence about solving every clue - we can help with that part.  If you’re interested, send an e-mail to the address mentioned in the FAQ page.

Usual high quality fare from Dac: excellent surfaces, good clear wordplay, and at least one I have failed to get.

A typically challenging puzzle from the master himself.  There are a few mini-themes such as religion (NUNNERY, WHITED SEPULCHRE, LOURDES, EXCOMMUNICATION), the Crusades (GRAIL, BALDWIN), a couple of medical terms (FEMORAL, LUSTRAL) and a couple of Welsh towns (MAESTEG, DOLGELLAU), but I can’t bring it all together, so either I’m looking for something that isn’t there, or it’s gone over my head.

Solving time (18 mins, although I had to look up LUSTRAL and DISILLUDE

ACROSS

1 MAE-(<=GETS) - where MAE refers to Mae West, the actress

5 FE-MORAL - of the femur

9 J-AC-K.O.-FALL-TRADES

10 SOMME(lier)

12 YOUNGSTER - (grey not us)* - clever anagram

14 D-URAL - aka Duralumin, Duraluminum or Duraluminium, an allow of copper, manganese and magnesium, first used in arship frames by the Germans.

16 D(IS-ILL)UDE - had to look this word up, then kicked myself for not working it out.

18 LOADS-TO-N.E.

22 WHITED SEPULCHRE - W(HIT)ED-(cups here)* about L - a person who is inwardly evil, but professes virtue

23 (Trevor)NUNN-E-RY

24 LOURDES - (older US)* - hmmm! an indirect anagram and a dodgy anagrind - an Araucaria special?

DOWN

2 EX-COMMUNICATION - “bull” in the sense of a procalamation (Papal Bull, eg)

3 TWO-LEGGED - EGG in (old wet)* - I can’t find a dictionary that defines “isosceles” as two-legged, but I suppose I can see what he is getting at.

5 FUL(L)-MAR-KS

6 MARC-0

7 RIDING-ROUGHS-HOD - Wasn’t sure about RIDING = Yorkshire at first, but then reconsidered.  If you take it as RIDING ROUGHS = “Yorkshire hooliganes” it works.

8 L-(a)USTRAL(ia) - LUSTRAL is a sedative drug

13 TED-IOU-SLY

14 DOLGELLAU - (gold)*-ELL-AU

15 BALD-WIN - referring to Baldwin of Boulogne, one of the leaders of the First Crusade.

17 EARLESS

More thematic wizardry from my favourite compiler: spot the colours in 6 across clues.

loonapick had to admit defeat on this puzzle.  This was partly because the theme of the puzzle mainly affected England rather than Scotland.  It was Michael Fish and his quote about the telephoned hurricane warning - the puzzle appeared on the 20th anniversary of the 1987 storms (I saw repeats of the quote three or four times on the TV that day - so I think loonapick also struggled as he didn’t start on the day of publication).  The ‘eye’ in the centre of the grid was presumably a visual hint.

The quotation is: A woman rang to say she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well don’t worry, there isn’t. [Hurricane being anagrammed to 'raunchier'.]  The extra letters in wordplay for other answers gave: “Twelve examples of who said it”. So you had to find twelve fish in the grid and highlight them.  With careful consultation of Chambers and counting of cells, my 12 are (in the order they’d be listed as clues): SOLE, RUFF, BASS, RUDD, ORFE, CHUB, SPRAT, SKATE, BAR, TROUT, SMELT, DAB.  The biggest problem for the setter was probably ensuring that there are no alternative fish elsewhere in the grid.

For me, spotting the quote was pretty easy, but fairly tough clues meant that the rest of the puzzle still took quite a while - maybe three or four hours in total.

In the clue explanations below, the clues with extra letters in wordplay start with “+”