I started quite slowly with this puzzle, but that turned out to be a good thing…

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We found this a very  interesting and entertaining crossword. I (Hi) found it easy to start, but difficult to finish – the opposite of my normal experience! Twelve across clues had to be “treated” before entry, as did twelve down clues. The methods of treatment were different and to be discovered from the misprints in the other ten clues in each case.

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Samuel is a setter I have come across in The Listener and Magpie as well as here in the Inquisitor series.  I have always enjoyed his puzzles.  This was no exception.  Like all good puzzles, a number of different layers were revealed as I went through.

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Some answers have a letter shifted before entry, and these letters spell out the name of a group. The members of the group form a number of other entries, but the answers to their associated clues are their disguises.
 
I soon discovered a few clashes (focussed on the main diagonal), and got the answers to 43a and 34d which were not the corresponding entries. A little later I tumbled (almost simultaneously) to the entries for 9d and 6a which were not the answers to the clues – and the penny dropped, giving me the name of the group … and quite a bit of tidying up to do.

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When I learned that The Inquisitor numbers were changing to what they would
have been if they had gone sequentially from 1, I wondered if the editor had
something up his sleeve for 1111 and I wasn’t disappointed.

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Inquisitor puzzles must be subject to the same kind of rule as umbrellas – if I fail to notice that it’s my turn to blog and do them in a hurry, they turn out to be really difficult. This time I did notice and tackled this puzzle on the day of publication. Result: it took about 60 minutes, with only 8 looks at Chambers for me – I can imagine less experienced solvers needing more, but about a dozen looks would probably be enough.

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As usual with a Schadenfreude offering there were a lot of unfamiliar words – LYTTA, DONAT, PACHALIC and NITID to name but four! The clues were scupulously fair, though one of them has defeated us for total understanding (see 38D), and we have slight reservations about SET-TOS – the hyphen held us up for a while. A couple of surnames too – Orbison and Calder. I (Hi) now use the internet for all this kind of lookup, so am unaware whether they appear in biographical dictionaries. I have to admit that without computer aids I would not have managed to complete this puzzle. Anyone who did has my admiration!

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We were told that seven grid entries, clued without definition, were of a kind.  Their response to an exhortation would affect the method of entry of a further seven clue answers.  Further, all clues that did have a definition contained a misprint of one letter, always occurring in the definition part.  The correct letters would spell out the quotation [which proved to be the exhortation] and its author.  The person referred to in the exhortation had to be highlighted in the completed grid.

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Jumbles of words have to be removed from nine clues before solving; these words form five items and we have to black out a symmetrical two-word phrase in the completed grid that describes them. The final reason for their removal (12, two words), to be written below the grid, is playfully implied by single extra letters in the wordplay of the remaining clues.
 
I had completed about half the puzzle (mainly below the SW-NE diagonal) before I located the first jumble, in 7a. However, this immediately confirmed my early guesses of both the theme and the two words to be written below the grid.

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Happy New Year! (he says as he stores up this report on Christmas Eve)

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As this is blog is due for publication on Christmas day, may we wish our readers a Happy Christmas and a successful Inquisitorial New Year!

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Phi is one of the more prolific setters with his puzzles appearing in a wide range of publications.  There is always something different about his puzzles and this was no exception.

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Extra letters in the wordplay lead to part of a quotation and its author, from which the (eleven) unclued entries can be deduced. There are ten thematic examples, one of which corresponds to two unclued entries (so I presumed the other nine examples were to do with the remaining unclued entries).
 
This puzzle was quite slow to start (and slowish to continue): in quite a few of the answers I had only part of the wordplay so couldn’t figure out the extra letter; a number of words were new to me (e.g. RACA, FRIS, VESAK, EARNEST in the sense used here); and there was some deft use of ‘arms-length’ synonyms (e.g. force = waterfall = lin).

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What a struggle.

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Solving time: very roughly 6 hours, with LOTS of cheating

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After two weeks of fiendish Inquisitors, we were due an easy one. Happily for my blogging this was it!

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I think this was Ikela’s second Inquisitor (update: I gather it his third).  I blogged a previous one just under 6 months ago.  That one, entitled Fatal Attraction,  was based on Bonnie and Clyde.  This one had no link to films, actors, actressess, other famous artists or place names, but instead was related to money.  Specifically, it was related to the pound in your pocket (hence the puzzle’s title ‘Out of Pocket’), as described below.

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Four unclued entries, two clued entries and one hidden name are thematically linked, and these last three have to be highlighted (16 cells). Then we have to swap two letters in the grid, revealing an author and a name from one of his works, also thematic.
 
Dysart’s previous puzzles as an Inquisitor have all been rather good (as were his/her three Listener ones), so I was expecting some high quality cluing and a neat theme – and wasn’t disappointed, though a clearer signal as to the nature of the two thematic clued entries would have been appreciated. The answers came to me largely corner by corner: some of the top left, all the bottom left, then the bottom right (giving me DUPPY and the likely theme), and after finishing the top left (with JUMBY confirming the theme), I was faced with a fairly blank top right, which eventually yielded (spotting BANQUO on the way).

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What a bad start, I thought.

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It was quite difficult to make progress at first, but the “extra letters in wordplay” phrase started to emerge from CIANS suggesting “politicians”, and QUISLING as a possible unclued answer. Looking up “politicians” in ODQ was fruitless, so I worked away at the clues, then Googled the full phrase with the help of the initial “ninety per cent”. The complete slightly parapharased version is “Ninety per cent of politicians give the rest a bad name, Kiss(inger)”. The full set of ten unclued politicians is MUGABE, MANDELA, BUSH, MOSLEY, STALIN, THATCHER, QUISLING, GOEBBELS, ARCHER, SADDAM – I guess Mandela is the most likely candidate to represent the ten per cent. The final “give the rest a kiss” from extre letters seemed a nicely bizarre touch. Probably about 3 hours all told, so roughly average Inq. difficulty.

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Superb stuff from Phi as usual. Impeccable clues and a nice theme with a bit of work needed to fill in the middle five rows.

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Schadenfreude is one of the most regular Inquisitor setters.  I have blogged a number of his puzzles in the past and all have proved challenging.  This one was no exception.  It took me a while to get the theme, but once I did the whole thing got a lot easier.

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Samuel’s first puzzle as an Inquisitor, but he’s a setter familiar to Listener solvers, notably with #3975 and more recently with #4038.
 
Twelve thematic clues are of the “Definition & Letter-Mixture” sort. In the remaining clues, the wordplay leads to a superfluous letter, and these spell out the primary reference, the unclued entry at 1a being a related name.

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