Inquisitor 1338: Septet by Dysart

31 comments on “Inquisitor 1338: Septet by Dysart”

1. Nice puzzle, lovely blog.
   And nice to see ETWEE making another appearance. Is this some sort of running joke?

   For quite a while I thought the top row entry was ARSE BANDIT.
   (Apologies if this sounds like me being crude – but it is a vernacular phrase.)
   I eventually thought this was probably unlikely.

   Then, I was held up for ages thinking early on that the first down entry answer was ONE OF THE BEST.

   Deliberate red herrings?

   Oh, and being hopeless at word searches I never found SENSES>

2. I had a very busy week, and didn’t have a lot of time to wrestle with this, but in the few hours I did spend on it, I made very little headway. I often struggle with puzzles where one has to solve a large number of clues without any crossing letters…I always think the clues should be (slightly) easier to offset this, but evidently Dysart doesn’t agree!

   Well and truly beaten. Thanks anyway.

3. One of the few answers I did get was ‘etwee’ and, like jonsurdy@1, it struck me as being pretty spooky! This word just keeps cropping up, and I’m sure that these puzzles were all compiled some time ago, so it can’t be deliberate (unless the editor is grouping the puzzles by recurring words to play tricks with our minds….)

4. All regular setters develop a “Not that again” list, and I suspect that ETWEE/ETUI and (a few pages away) EPHA are on many.

   Trickier than The L that weekend I also seem to recall.

5. Even harder than last week in my opinion, and less satisfying in the end, although I enjoyed the challenge of piecing the words together in the grid. I was uncertain about KREESES and BESEE (I had KRISSES and BESSE pencilled in), which didn’t help when it came to looking for the final 5-something.

   I was expecting more from the finale – I thought the ‘separately hidden’ word was going to turn up in the bars and spent a long time squinting at a blank version of the grid (I found Excel a useful tool in solving this – never done that before) but couldn’t see more than a couple of Ss and a possible E and J.

   I’m guessing Dysart was silently cursing when ETWEE turned up a couple of weeks back too.

   I couldn’t parse ETA, so thanks for that. Where does the final S come from in HEARSAYS though? Is that an abbreviation for stokes?

   Thanks to Hi, Ho, Ba and Dysart for the challenge.

6. I really enjoyed this puzzle. The grid slotted together nicely without having to cold solve too many clues. A nice mix of clues as usual from Dysart. I would be very happy with more like this thanks. Excellent clear blog too.

7. After last week’s struggle I was hoping for something a little more amenable this week. Alas it was not to be. I normally quite enjoy these blank grid puzzles, but rely on solving sufficient across and down clues at the top of the grid to get started. Although I got the first three across clues, I could only find ETWEE and BEAUT from the downs. Looking at the blog I’m glad I gave up when I did.

   Thanks Hihoba for persevering and explaining the puzzle, and to Dysart I’ll just offer my white flag of surrender.

8. OPatrick @5

   stokes is, apparently, the CGS unit of kinematic viscosity.

   Thanks for the blog Hihoba, especially for the parsing of kreeses – I had ‘creeses’ unfortunately so the parsing eluded me. Otherwise found this to be a very enjoyable puzzle and found the septet eventually. I was also misled for a long time by ‘one of the best’ however I finally realised what ‘but not numbers’ meant in the preamble. Thank you Dysart.

9. Me @ 8

   But the symbol for stokes is St !!

10. Me @ 9

    … and sometimes just ‘S’. Phew.

11. Thanks for the blog. I didn’t spot the senses, but otherwise all complete. With Bandits at the top and Monkeys at the bottom I first googled Terry Gilliam films, to no avail.

12. Two really tough ones in a row. I did manage to get three answers (which was two more than the previous week) but that was not enough to start putting entries in the grid. Is Inquisitor getting harder?

13. Yes – good fun as others have said. Lots of misdirection in the clues leading to many forehead slapping moments.

    I especially liked KREESES as I was convinced, having parsed the rest of the clue, that Billy referred to Bill (William) Shakespeare and I couldn’t find KES in Chambers. Then I suddenly remembered young Billy Casper from Ken Loach’s masterpiece KES in the seventies.

    Thanks Dysart and HiHoBa – glad to see you took last week’s comments on board and bordered your table.

14. Thanks for the blog. I did wonder what commenters who last week thought the puzzle merited a 5 on the difficulty scale would give this one.

    I, too, struggled to complete this & noticed the irony that on the week the editor’s ‘Questions of difficulty’ appeared the Listener took a lot less time to complete than the Inquisitor.

    My experience was similar to Hihoba’s in that it was only after identifying the down clue start from the symmetry plus some trial and error for how to fit in the initial across & down clues that I had solved that enabled me to get a foothold. Then, fortunately I could drop in nearly all the clues I had solved (about a third of them) which gave me enough crossers in enough entries to (slowly) complete it.

15. Dormouse @12 – I think it is getting much harder and that is to its detriment, in my view. No need for it to compete with Listener for degree of difficulty as I think the IQ “solver base” probably expects (and hopes for) something a bit more gentle. Not so at the moment!

    I look forward to the result of John H’s appeal for views on difficulty as requested in last week’s puzzle.

16. This took me most of the day Sunday to work my way through.

    Thought it was a real grind at the time as I didn’t calculate properly to start with where the across clues ended and the downs began and didn’t see for quite a while that the first across clues started on the second line.

    Some great clueing and misdirections – ah, KES, slapped myself on the forehead when I got that, as I saw the film in the cinema, read the book…I used to think that ‘Kestrel for a Knave’ was lifted from Shakespeare but it’s not apparently.

    Thought the ‘seven’ theme was a bit weak and the whole thing was much of a slog to really enjoy at the time. Sorry Dysart, I only appreciated it after the event.

    Wonder when we’re going to get the reductio ad absurdam of a completely blank grid: just the outline, no grid lines or squares and left to get on with our own devices ? Hmm…some fiendish setter probably working on it as we speak.

    Thanks HiHoba, your blog is really good and makes the puzzle seem a lot more straightforward than it actually was !

17. We half expected an easier offering after Nimod’s puzzle the week before!

    Not so, but we did enjoy it. Having completed the grid we started looking for the link to FIVE and it took us a little while to guess that it could be SENSES and then spent far too long looking for it in the grid.

    Thanks to everyone – like the blog!

18. I like this level of challenge – it gives me something to work on over the week. Consistently over the last few weeks I’ve reached a point where I thought I’d never make much progress but then things started dropping into place. I know if I work hard at it I can at least get close to finishing.

19. A “5”, yes. And just when I was so busy doing a mass of work-related stuff – it’s exam time.

    Like BF @8, I put in ‘creeses’ and didn’t find time to go back, figure out the wordplay, and realise my error. (The second time an incorrect C/K decision has cost me.) And I hoped someone would explain why NAILS = ‘gets’ …

    Also, like NormanLinFrance @11, I chased up the Bandit/Monkeys/Gilliam connection for a while.

    And yes, Rob H @16, it did seem like a slog at the time. And for something along the lines of a rather free for all puzzle, you could take a look at Listener 3992 by Dimitry, where the preamble was: “Clues are given in the conventional order but the grid is to be constructed by solvers, who must draw bars, shade in or blacken all unfilled cells and highlight the letters forming a word that offers an explanation as to the form of the grid. Numbering is not required.” {You might care to refer to SHARAWAGGI in Chambers.}

    Thanks to Dysart, and to Hihoba – how serendipitous that your avatar appears as the bottom line of the grid for the puzzle you blogged.

20. I completely missed the significance of ‘but not numbers’! Very nice, thanks BF@

21. Thanks for all the comments – we bloggers thrive on them!

    Sorry to have omitted the parsing of the final S in HEARSAYS – S = stokes (CGI unit of viscosity), and perhaps I should have said a bit more about KES. I thought the “bird” in that clue was REE for a long time!

    Yes Kenmac, I did research “borders” and “cellspacing” and “cellpadding” in response to last week’s comments about bordered tables. I agree that it does make the answers more readable. And yes HG I was conscious of the avatar connection. thank you for pointing it out – I felt I should leave it for someone else.

22. HG@19, I am not a regular Listener solver so thanks for the reference.

    Guess the old saying “there’s nothing new under the sun” springs to mind !

23. Took me forever to realise that I shouldn’t start my acrosses in the first row – once there, it more or less slotted into place, eventually. Seriously tough, in a line of pretty tough IQs – bit disappointed with the (5) SENSES, as I was hoping for something more obscure or fun; but particularly because I was stuck for a while wondering whether to highlight the final ‘S’ on the utterly misconceived basis that ‘well the 7 SAMURAIs is just singular, so do I have to highlight the S?’. Syntactical or grammatical (I still don’t know the difference) accuracy thankfully dawned on me.

    If I see ETWEE again I will scream.

24. Far too difficult for me. I managed a handful (and I agree with Ross 23 about “etwee”) — would have been more had I been able to use intersecting letters, but obviously you can’t use that technique for jigsaws. Would never have got some of the clues even with intersections anyway — there were some difficult ones here.

    I was wondering if it was “eta” but couldn’t parse it. I almost got “snail” but I was trying to get it to be “nails” instead. And I couldn’t work out why “goals” meant “shuts up”. D’oh!

    I didn’t have a great deal of time to spend on this one anyway — last week I was working abroad all week (and forgot to take it with me), and this week I’ve been driving 3 or 4 hours a day, which is leaving me exhausted.

25. Like Matt @24 I also only managed handful of clues, and nowhere near enough to make any headway with fitting them into the grid. Thoroughly enjoyed the challenge, though, and will keep plugging away at the IQ!

26. Why does NAILS = ‘gets’?

    Too tough for me – about 50% – but I did guess SAMURAI. (The only one I did, and as that is the seven I assumed it was the ‘hidden word’.)

27. Violet@26: I understood “nails” as in the context of “Inquisitor 1338 was really difficult, but I eventually nailed it” where nail = understand = get. Not directly in Chambers, but I thought it was just about OK. Anyone have a better explanation?

28. violet@26 and Hi of hihoba@27

    I understood gets/nails in the same way as Hi, although Mrs. BF understood it as something that might be said in a police procedural drama ‘we finally nailed/got the killer’. Much the same logic I suppose.

29. Thanks for everyone’s comments. At the time I compiled the puzzle I didn’t have a particular outlet in mind, but the test solver thought it was ideal for The Inquisitor series, telling me that John Henderson was accepting tougher than average puzzles. As I couldn’t submit any more Listener puzzles for a long time (my quota of two in the pipeline being fully used up) I sent it to John, hoping for the best.

    I opted for a carte blanche grid to disguise the symmetry of the unclued elements and to prevent the theme from emerging prematurely. It also meant that the thematic entries did not begin in inappropriately numbered cells. My hope was that some anagrams (especially 1dn) and a few of the easier clues would enable solvers to make a start on constructing the grid, and that at some point solvers would see the thematic symmetry. As the clues were correctly sequenced (unlike a true carte blanche puzzle) I didn’t see a great need to make the clues especially easy. However, when I learned from a friend that Nimrod’s puzzle the previous week was tough, I was a bit apprehensive, expecting some stick from solvers fed up with two tough puzzles in a row.

    There was nothing devious in the use of ‘separately hidden’ in the preamble. It was there to prevent solvers highlighting A-SIDE, which can be read as an inverted L starting with the first A of ERASTIAN, but which shares the I of SAMURAI.

    I expect I could have avoided the use of ETWEE. It didn’t occur to me at the time. Perhaps I should add it to my ‘kill list’. Top of my ‘kill list’ are anonymous names. I hate them in crosswords, and do my best to avoid them.

30. Dyste @29: What do you mean by “anonymous names”?

31. I simply mean first names that are general, rather than related to a specific well-known figure. Sometimes nothing else will fit, but if I cannot avoid a proper noun I prefer it to be of a famous person, geographical feature, etc.

    Dysart (Sorry, I omitted my crossword pseudonym from my previous post.

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