29 comments on “Inquisitor 1759: Murder Mystery by Jaques”

1. In addition to the misgivings you mention regarding it being a comet / asteroid, the KT Boundary is apparently now called the K-Pg Boundary. This give me some moments of doubt at the close, but I still enjoyed the solve. Thought the change from CENOZOIC to MEZOZOIC was pretty neat.

2. it’s MESOZOIC not MEZOZOIC (with UNNEST swapping to UNSENT)

3. I enjoyed filling the grid and found the word swapping an especially enjoyable challenge, not easy. I don’t really enjoy word-searches and found some of the thematic material but then lost interest after a while. I remember word-searches being what teachers gave kids for homework of they didn’t have anything prepared that week. I understand that many people do enjoy them, so that absolutely fine with me, the job of an editor is to mix it up every week.

   Thanks to Jaques for the ingenious cluing and to kenmac for the blog.

4. I wanted the piece of evidence to be CENOTE beginning with Kenmac’s yellow C and arranged on two lines, but this doesn’t really stack up, I think.

   The crater only appears as the remaining SE corner, so starting again with the yellow C and ignoring the other C above and to the left, the half CRATER is contiguous. With HG’s correction all final entries in the grid are real words, so I think this must be the Jacques’ intention.

   Thank to Jacques & Kenmac.

5. The rubric refers to “one of these pieces of evidence” before perturbing two down entries. CRATER can be traced from the beginning of Ceno… then citRATes, cEno…, and rancoR – contiguous. But there is also/instead CENOTE from CENOzoic and citraTEs – a sinkhole and an appropriate shape.
   I too spent a long time looking for an asteroid until I realised that YUCATAN was in 7 of the cells we were looking for, and the +5 came from COMET. (And fitted in with the alleged perpetrator being revealed only after we swap CAME to MACE.)

   Mixed feeling about this, as others have. Thanks all round.

6. started on comment @5 before comment @4 was posted, so some duplication there
   (and Jaques doesn’t have a C)

7. Thanks for identifying YUCATAN COMET for me Kenmac. No wonder I couldn’t find 12 cells which meant anything; I was looking for them all to be in a straight line. I think you’ve misidentified CRATER as one of the pieces of evidence. Before the letter swap CENOTE appears in a vaguely hole-like shape from the C at the start of CENOZOIC. And what is the description of the perpetrator which we were promised would be revealed? It can hardly be CANTERED can it?
   Thanks Jacques, a good Inquisitor but I didn’t enjoy the fruitless search an asteroid – not a comet!

8. Sorry Jaques, HG@6 has pointed out that I too have spelt your name wrongly

9. Way above my pension grade so thanks for the excellent blog kenmac

10. Howard L @7: the “description of the perpetrator which we were promised would be revealed” is YUCATAN COMET (only appearing after we swap C & M in CAME as I said in my comment @5). The straight line is drawn from halfway up the LH edge of the Y of Yucatan to halfway down the RH edge of the T of comeT (and passes through only those 12 cells).

11. A brilliant idea with the word-swapping (turned out easier than it sounded) and a super interesting theme.

    But, oh so many things wrong with the endgame:
    – “Recreate the scene at the moment the deed was committed” was just far too vague an instruction to make avoid hunting aimlessly around the grid
    – Nowhere in Wikipedia does it refer to a “Yucatan comet” as the perpetrator. Instead there is talk of an asteroid and the Chicxulub crater. So not only do we not know what we’re looking for, but what we’re looking for is a made-up description
    – The change from Cenozoic to Mesozoic goes backwards rather than forwards in time, so we first have a crater that then gets undone to reveal the comet. Surely the other direction would have made a lot more sense
    – The “straight line through its 12 cells” instruction sent most people down a “12 cells in a row” rabbit hole
    – I don’t think the KT boundary [or indeed K-PG boundary] can be called an “object through which these actions passed”. I haven’t quite got my head around it, but I think the comet caused the boundary rather than passing through it?

    A real shame because the overall idea and construction was brilliant.

12. Yes, I think the most enjoyable and challenging grid fill for quite a well, I really enjoyed it. Like others, I struggled to find a ‘straight line’, though I noticed a crooked line with Yucatan, but couldn’t square it with the instructions. I also found the Wiki page and therefore the KT Boundary, but not the evidence, despite looking in the right place. It must be Cenote, surely, as we’ve already got ‘crater’ en route to the solution, although ‘cenote’ is not really ‘around’ the C, as it includes it. Ironically, the six letters of ‘cenote’ rather resemble a crater (and a cenote should look more like a pyramid…)

    Thanks To Jacques for an ingenious challenge and to kenmac

13. Thanks and apologies to HG@5. I think our comments crossed as I don’t remember CENOTE being identified before. I also thought we had to identify the perpetrator rather than the description so was looking for two things not one. I think the rubric could be understood in both ways, but I guess mine was rather perverse.

14. H___G____ @2
    Oops! Corrected now.

15. arnold @11
    Yeah, I wanted to put all that in but blog was already too clumsy.

16. Sorry to but in , I have not actually done the puzzle but someone asked me about it for information . The K-T boundary ( now renamed ) is a layer of iridium which is very strong evidence for an asteroid collision. It was postulated a long time before the crater was actually found.

17. Butt in of course.

18. By way of contrast to the prevailing grumpy mood, let me confess that I loved this, thought it was beautifully done, and was not confused by anything. I’ve experienced plenty of frustration in the past when trying to find unspecified things in grids. This one turned out to be a pleasant and rewarding search (for me, but I love dinosaurs).

    The “straight line” was fair, because readers are asked to draw it. The setter did not say that the letters lay in a straight line. The setter asked us to draw a straight line through the letters. The wording is specific enough to warn us to rethink the easy interpretation if the twelve letters are not forthcoming.

    The grid with the swapped letters is still a valid grid with valid words. It’s not that MASTERED has to change to CANTERED specifically. It’s that both grids are made up of real words. CAME becomes MACE and UNNEST becomes UNSENT.

    I appreciated the pictorial layout of the hidden words.

    I did raise my eyebrow at COMET, and would have preferred METEOR.

    The CRATER is there both before and after inpact, whereas it would have been nicer to have only the COMET before and only the CRATER after. If we go with a non-overlapping principle, then I suppose the COMET in the Mesozoic blocks out the crater, and then after impact the comet is vaporised and that allows us to see the CRATER.

    Usually I have enormous trouble with barred rubricked cryptics. It was a pleasant surprise to find one that I could do, with instructions that made sense and remained pleasing in retrospect. I did not expect that so many others would feel otherwise.

19. My mistake. The CRATER appears only after impact, as indicated by John Lowe @4.

    Those six cells may be viewed as a half-crater, but actually I’m thinking of tilting it 45 degrees and viewing them as a vertical cross-section through the crater, with two raised bumps where the cross-section passes through the rim, and one bump in the middle for the central clump of material that one sees immediately after impact.

20. Another unimpressed solver here. Far too vague a preamble, and the bit about perpetrators was quite unnecessary. I found the KT Boundary but the rest of the endgame was a losing game of I Spy.

21. I still don’t understand why the endgame (and the changes) wasn’t described the other way around.

    Then you would have had the Yucatan Comet already in the grid (hence easier to find) plus the mesozoic to start with and no crater.

    Then you change to cenozoic, which makes the crater…

22. Arnold @21 : It is a murder mystery, which is why we start after the murder and work backwards.

    (I mean, yes, it could have been done the other way, and framed differently, i.e. not as a murder mystery.)

    I continue to be surprised that people found the search to be unnecessarily obscure. The evidence provided by the middle letters make it certain that this is about the KT extinction event. The word CENOZOIC is an obvious candidate for the “thematic entry” referred to in the rubric. MEXICAN PENINSULA can only be Baja California or YUCATAN, which latter can be found close to the start of the thematic entry, as long as the solver is alert to the different ways one might draw a straight line on a crossword grid.

    As I said, I’m pretty bad at these barred cryptics and yet this one felt fair and pleasantly ingenious. It’s all the other ones that I’ve never been able to do! I hate those ones.

23. Roz @16
    No need to apologise. Everyone’s welcome here.

24. Giabra – the significance of “obscure” terms in a word search is not that the terms are obscure per se. As you say they are things connected with a (possible) theme. There are other considerations. Two things to note here:

    1) IQs have a habit of signalling a theme with some red herrings, but the real theme is more cleverly hidden. You say the middle letters point to an “obvious” theme, that is true, but more experienced solvers may be less likely than you to jump to the conclusion that this is the theme they should be looking for.

    2) The terms in the grid are not the only extinction related terms the setter might have used, there are dozens if not hundreds of other terms that could equally be regarded as “not obscure”. The resulting wordsearch can become like a game of I-Spy: try and guess what the setter was thinking.

    A corollary to this is the complaints about the accuracy of some of the terms, e.g. can an event pass through a boundary that did not exist at the time of the event? Indeed the boundary was defined by the event, the event would create the boundary in the future, it did not pass through it. It is not the accuracy or obscurity per-se that is important, but because there are so many possible things that might be found how does a solver know for sure that they have found all the terms and only the terms that the setter was thinking of?

25. I’m as puzzled as Girabra by the negative responses to this puzzle (that said, I often fail to see anything remarkable about some of the puzzles getting rave reviews here).
    So much detail focused on such a small area of the grid would be hard enough to achieve without the complex thematic changes that we’ve got here (and leaving real words in the final grid is quite an achievement).
    On the broken ‘crater’ – I think ‘contiguous cells formed around the beginning of…’ ‘C’ means the letters of ‘crater’ are all in touch with ‘C’.
    On the historical/scientific accuracy of the endgame – for specialists some details loom large, but they didn’t worry me too much (I think ‘some available evidence’ and ‘alleged’ was sufficient warning in any case). Overall I found this very educational and being delivered in such an entertaining way was a real bonus.

26. On the plus side, we haven’t had 25 comments on an Inquisitor for a while 🙂

27. Arnold @26: not sure about “the plus side” – there tends to be a high number of comments when solvers disagree quite a lot. (See this post for example.)

28. I’d position mysef on the “That was fun” wing. The end game took a while but it resolved itself unambiguously albeit cryptically, and I don’t have any issue with some of the details not matching Wikipedia (I like to edit the offending page in these circumstances :-)!).

    But I do have a criticism. I thought the inclusion of “hole” and “sand” as “available evidence” was spurious (at best).

29. Thank you kenmac@23 , I do always feel welcome on this site, it is just I do not usually comment on a puzzle I have not done so felt a bit awkward. Someone at work had done it and asked me about the “comet” . There is virtually uniform consensus that it was an asteroid, hence the iridium signature at the boundary. I do not know if this affected the solve.

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