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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Piccadilly has set puzzles for all the series, although the last five years has seen him (Mick Willey) setting for Enigmatic Variations. He is also that rare beast, someone who sets both word and numerical puzzles.

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The preamble seemed quite straightforward, no extra letters etc in the wordplay just the possible modification of six across answers and twelve down ones before entering them in the grid.

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Five clues have no definition. That sounds easy, since that leaves over fifty other normal clues that presumably do. Little did I know …!

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Just over three years and three months ago I wrote this blog. I think it was my first for Fifteensquared. Since that Independent puzzle I have blogged the Guardian, Everyman, Azed, Inquisitor and Enigmatic Variations. I have blogged from several puzzles a week to a puzzle every several weeks. Life has finally got the better of me and I can’t find the time to write these things along with running, XC skiing, solving crosswords, trying to set crosswords, OU studies, OU work, and, oh, my full time job. So EV 900 will be my final blog.

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A new blogger is wanted for the EV. If anyone is interested please contact:
admin {at} fifteensquared {dot} net
Thanks.

It’s been the pantomime season and so here was a topical puzzle from Charybdis, with a neat little twist at the end. Some of the clues were rather tricky, even by EV standards, due to some obscure word meanings but there were sufficient starter clues to enable steady progress to be made.

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A puzzle entitled Eggheads in this month’s Magpie (January 2010) and French Polish in last week’s Inquisitor (#1108, 09/01/2010) are Nutmeg’s most recent offerings, and here we are with Prime Suspect.

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The first few answers I got were an across answer that was normal and 4dn for which I though STOP was a satisfactory answer. So it took a few minutes to work out what was going on. Seeing that KEEMA fitted 35dn and checking ESTOP in Chambers soon confirmed a possible un-preambled method for entering down answers. It was then a matter of solving more across clues to find some misquote emerging. So there was no last second penny-drop but there was an enjoyable well-clued puzzle to entertain for an hour or so.

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A fairly gentle, but enjoyable, start to the EV new year from Loda, though it is a good job that a full copy of ‘The Bridal of Triermain’ is available on-line because, not surprisingly, there isn’t one on my bookshelf (and the quotation doesn’t appear in ODQ).

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Lots going on in this preamble: a person appearing as an abbreviation (eh?), clues without definitions, unclued entries, and wordplay leading to an extra letter not entered. Plus something that appears in ODQ, and something else that doesn’t … looks like Google might have to come to the rescue.

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Oddly, I had just completed a Shark puzzle in Magpie before downloading the EV and discovering that it too was a Shark. I found the Magpie puzzle relatively easy but this one proved more difficult. Some of the clues had me using electronic aids (ACS and Chambers on the iPod) to find the answers that fitted and then working backwards. That’s not something I like doing but I did find a good handful of clues that tricky.

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There were quite a few easy, or relatively easy, clues in this puzzle so I had 90% of the grid (excluding the perimeter) filled in very quickly. It was then time to look at the unclued thematic entries referred to in the preamble.

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I have no idea what the title means, although it does sound a bit like a Swedish clothing company … or is that Hennes & Mauritz?

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I usually enjoy Samuel puzzles and this one was no exception. His puzzles are usually science-based or themed on old-chestnut jokes. This one was neither of these. Instead it was based on a clever play of words by the comic dramatist Plautus which almost translates in English.

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Misprints in the majority of definitions and twelve answers to be altered before entry according to the preamble, but no indication that these could both apply to the same clue. Also, ‘majority’ had me looking for far more misprints than 25 in 42 clues.

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As far as I can see, Hugo is a new setter, so good luck to him with this puzzle. As far as I’m concerned, he’s off to a good start with lots of things to find: a man, two things he described as ‘indistinguishable’, a title, and a revolutionary concept.

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In this puzzle you were required to deduce the title of a work by a figure (why that word was used I know not; it sounded a bit cryptic, but turned out not to be). Three answers without definition neeeded to be jumbled to give this figure, and the extra letters in the wordplay defined two words which in turn suggested a definition of the work!

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I made good progress during the first session, solving most of the clues fairly quickly but was held up for a while at the end by 16a and, particularly, 51a. With these resolved all that remained was the unclued thematic entries. There were a few where there was only one possible answer (eg 42a, 54a, 1d & 38d) but the majority had several options.

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A relatively simple preamble: eight answers require modification based on a quotation and author running round the perimeter.

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I printed this puzzle off on the day of its publication but set it aside due to work pressures. I intended to take it on holiday with me to Netherlands and Belgium. An overnight ferry from Newcastle to IJmuiden would give plenty of opportunity to tackle this and other puzzles. In the event I forgot to take this puzzle or any puzzle. It was a very dull journey!

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The subsidiary indication in each clue leads to an extra letter. These letters indicate the source of two questions (the second of which WAS rhetorical) and reveal a recent and unresolved problem (from which two of the unclued grid entries may be deduced).

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I didn’t know whether to expect a tricky puzzle from MynoT, or an easy one. He seems to be a setter who can produce varying levels of difficulty but, this being EV, I’ll assume for the time being it’s on the easy side … so I can relax a bit.

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As seems usual for me these days the preamble turned out to be harder to follow than the puzzle. In the end it was a fairly straightforward puzzle once the penny had dropped. At some point part way through I got the bit about END and BEGINNING and worked out the two full quotations. This done the authors dropped in to place as the unclued entries. and the tentative down entries could be done in a darker pencil. I’m still a bit lost on the bit of the preamble that says, “[...] attributing numerically specific meanings to the interchanged words.”

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Completing this puzzle was not helped by the enumeration being incorrect in 13a and 19a and, unless I have got something seriously wrong, by the preamble referring to “a famous artist or performer” when two of the solutions (19a & 32a) were novelists and a third (5d) is better known as a composer. The preamble also referred to ‘the initial letter of the deleted parts’ which would indicate the removal of more than one letter from the centre of a word but in two cases (30a & 24d) only a single letter was involved.

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