A smaller grid this week – only 121 blank squares, instead of the normal 169. Will this translate into a shorter solving time?

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Well another shortish preamble this week, put relatively succinctly, the  aim is to find a quotation to fill two answers and the diagonal by discovering the unclued work it is from, then determine how this is to be used to derive the answers to four other clues. A couple of further comments – one of the answers, a verb is not in Chambers,  except in conjunction with another one, whilst one answer is listed as an abbreviation in Chambers. Definitely looks to be on the easy side of the EV spectrum, as Salamanca’s EV puzzles tend to be.

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This was a nice straightforward puzzle from Loda, with six members of a group appearing as unclued entries in the grid and two others (not part of the group) appearing as extra words in two clues. Ten across clues and all down clues contained misprints supplying two names and a question & answer.

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The full 225 letters this week (unusual for an EV recently?), so value for money from Kruger, and more to blog for your’s truly…but, to paraphrase from John Cleese’s ‘great actor’ in the Monty P sketch:
‘I don’t want you to get the impression it’s just a question of the number of letters… um… I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important’…

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I wonder if I was alone in finding this tough.

In retrospect, the preamble wasn’t unnecessarily misleading. Nor at any time did I think the clueing unfair. Still, for me this EV was one heck of a struggle. There were precious few gifts (11ac being a notable exception), but I certainly wasn’t helped by my synapses declaring a ceasefire.

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So a relatively simple preamble this week. Two unclued answers, some answers that don’t fill their available space and some UPWARD MOTION to fill the spaces at the end. All the clues are straight cryptic with nothing hidden – Sounds like an entry-level EV to me, but is it? But more importantly, I can use my pen again!

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Here we are with Oxymoron again (Schadenfreude’s EV pseudonym). A pretty straightforward puzzle this time: eight clues with an extra word with first and last letters spelling out a hint, and the barred-off letters of their respective clues leading to the ‘originator’.

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An ‘EV’ puzzle in more ways than one, as it turned out! Bit of a complicated preamble – the solver is searching for a ‘gang of four’ who aren’t actually in the grid, but must be deduced by associations with 8 unclued entries and/or 8 extra words in some clues. To corroborate this, a relevant ‘work’ is given by corrected letters in 17 clues, and its ‘source’ can be found by jumbling two otherwise normal entries.

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Bonjour! Un petit peu less ceremony with this one – just ten ‘thematically entered’ answers and four unclued entries. Still, there’s some grid highlighting to be done, which always gives one a pleasant feeling of completion – if done properly, at least! I found the clueing to be fair, with some nicely misleading touches. For some reason, the anagrind in 1ac eluded me for some time. There were some nice touches showing a caring hand – the surface reading in 15 was rather better concealed than I would have thought possible with a hidden answer, for instance. 6ac and 35 made me smile, also.

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Well – a seriously convoluted pre-amble this week. Pausing only for a sharp intake of breath, here goes - Removal of abbreviations from one clue in each even numbered down column and rearrangement of the result into a new word; 6 clues contain superfluous letter pairs, which must be identified and removed prior to solving the clue and Extra letters in the wordplay of all bar the answers, that have had abbreviations removed. And that’s not all – another sharp intake of breath – then you need to determine a word (not in Chambers) , which is to be entered as the title of the puzzle, which itself is derived, in some manner, from the additional letters in the wordplay and to finish it off the final grid is to be adjusted to achieve an “objective”. Enough to make the casual crossword -solver wait for next week’s offering, or reach for the Sudoku.  But – all in all the ingredients for a very interesting few hours cogitation. Definitely, in my view, the toughest one I’ve blogged yet. And for my second blog in a row the recommended use of a pencil first!

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Well, it seems that I’m the blogger that gets saddled with all the EVs involving jumbled entries! There are twenty extra words in clues to be discovered, paired and jumbled to form the unclued entries and an (presumably the) author. The remaining sixteen answers are to be jumbled.

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I came to this EV tired and jaded after a long weekend away golfing and drinking…(or was that the other way around?)…not having done a crossword of any form for 4 days – and was a little slow getting my head round the preamble, let alone the theme…I certainly didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!

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I don’t know what has happened to the scheduled blogger so here is my belated analysis of this puzzle. The note on my copy indicates that I found it hard and the degree of difficulty was not helped by the EV gremlins appearing again, one clue with no enumeration, two clues with the wrong enumeration and two clues not in the alphabetical order of their answers.

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Well a complex preamble this week – certainly one that won’t make sense till 11 down is derived. On first reading it sounds like a puzzle based upon a literary character. Then there’s an adjustment to the “completed” grid with a recommendation to use a pencil first.  Personally I like the satisfaction of watching the grid filling up with black ink! – So it was ink for me on a copy first.

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This is the sixth Enigmatic Variations puzzle by Hypnos since the EV blog started at fifteensquared about 18 months ago, and I’ve done four of them! They are usually good fun, so I tackle this with relish.

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A wonderfully crafted puzzle, which had me gaping in awe at the artistry of the themed-puzzle setter – although I found the clues generally easier than usual to solve, and it suffered a little from the unfortunate coincidence of the recent similarly-themed Inquisitor 1122, by Loda. The solver was to identify a ‘couple going out together’ in each across answer – with hindsight, maybe an eerily prescient reference to the new couple occupying 10 Downing Street (I’m talking Dave and Nick here, not Dave and Sam…you put your Right Clegg in, your Left Clegg out; in, out, in, out, shake it all about…).

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I rather enjoyed this romp.

I am, as I have previously confessed, rather fond of the ways and means used by some EVs (including this one): quotations constructed from excised letters and hidden grid entries which need to be highlighted. That’s why I do ‘em.

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A murder mystery this week – sounds a good one. The preamble promises a hunt for not only the murder victim, but also the location of the victim and the investigator of the case. Once these have been determined it’s on to isolate the perpetrator from 5 (to be identified) suspects, with their murderous means and motive.  Is the puzzle number significant – This could be very interesting?

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A fairly straightforward puzzle from Oxymoron this week. Each clue requires a letter or a word to be removed before solving. These spell out a quotation which reflects the clues and suggests how some answers are modified before entry. The originator’s initials must be highlighted.

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Although I got to the ‘bottom’ of the theme quite quickly, the second variation had me chasing my own tail, and even barking up the wrong tree, for a while. But(t), it was the more feline clue at 20A which had me stumped the longest.

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I am most grateful to Warbler for this delightfully appropriate EV for my debut blog. Not only did it use two of my favourite mechanisms – corrected letters to spell out a message and a hidden grid entry – but the ‘helpful pointer’ of the title (to which I perhaps should have paid more attention at an early stage of solving) chimes most conveniently with my own soubriquet.

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The End of term – A shortish preamble indicating corrections to be applied to definitions and modifications to the other answers before grid entry. Would this puzzle raise an enigmatic smile – Gioconda? And what exactly is the End of term?

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Kruger has been setting EV puzzles for over ten years, with a puzzle every four or five months, and the occasional Inquisitor for good measure. I have always found his crosswords fair, but quite taxing, and covering a wide range of themes. This puzzle proved fairly tough, especially my last clue, 3dn! This necessitated a correction in the following week’s paper.

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I found this to be one of the hardest EVs for quite some time. Even though I got the theme fairly early on from 31ac, quickly confirmed by 12ac, it took a while to complete the puzzle (about twice as long as usual) even with the help of knowing which letters needed to be removed from sixteen clues before solving.

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Quite a complex preamble this week – additional letters in the wordplay of the across clues, additional words in the down clues and ten unclued entries, seven of which required modification. So what about the complexity? must admit, the title sounded strangely familiar. An easy first blog or a baptism of fire?

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