Excellent puzzle based on James Bond villains on the centenary of the birth of Ian Fleming, with some inventive and amusing clues.

Once I’d twigged that we were looking at SCARAMANGA (which led me to the Bond theme), not SCARAMOUCH, the outside ring fell out quite easily (after a bit of Wiki-ing), the villains in clockwise sequence being:
SCARAMANGA, HUGO DRAX, BLOFELD, MR. BIG, LE CHIFFRE and ROSA KLEBB.

The misprinted letters in across clues 11, 24, 38, 40 spell BOND; misprints in down clues 8, 19, 20,28,32,33,34,35 spell VILLAINS

I spent a long time trying to spell something like “Ian Fleming Centenary” with the letters unclued in the wordplay, before realising that it was WHERE they were not WHAT they were that mattered. Inevitably they were 007 when highlighted.

Solving time : Lots and lots!

BOLD letters are letters with no wordplay, misprints are indicated by BOLD and italic in the definition.

Sory about the lack of colour, the software removes it all when I save the draft! 

This puzzle was presented as a 10 row *11 columns jigsaw within a frame of 12 rows *13 columns such that the outer rim was independent of interlocking words. The central square in the top row was blacked out to leave the outer rim comprising 45 cells that would ultimately contain a quotation and its originator.

Except for the central column, which only required the movement of one letter, each row and column had to have two letters removed and placed at either end of the respective row or column. If there were two clues in a row or column, then one letter was to be removed from each answer. Single clues in a row or column required the removal of two letters from the answer. First letters removed went to the left or upper ends of the row or column. Second letters removed went to the right or lower ends. This removal exercise generated 41 letters of the quotation, described in the preamble as ‘a favourite quotation’. Solvers had to deduce the 4 letters in the outermost corners of the grid in order to complete the quotation.

Fortunately the definition and wordplay in each clue led to the same answer which meant that the clues were completely normal. I think it would have been trickier to solve the clues if the wordplay had led to the entry after the letters had been removed. This, of course, would have made the identification of the removed letters a lot easier.

I got to off to a fairly quick start given that all the 11 or 12 letter words contained within the outer edges of the jigsaw were all easily identifiable anagrams. There were a number of other clues that were anagrams or part anagrams. I counted 9 in all, out of 29 clues. I think I raced through about 12 or 13 clues before I ground to a halt and had to start thinking a lot more. The jigsaw element of the puzzle meant that there a lot of choices of potential letters in the unsolved answers so I had to study the component parts of the clues in some depth before I could get going again. As the quotation built up, I found myself homing in on ‘Eight’, ‘Tight’ or ‘Light’ or extensions, e.g. ‘Eighteen’, ‘Tighten’ etc. at the beginning. I couldn’t make much sense of the body of the quotation. The real breakthrough was seeing P/I L/I C/K O/E M M/I/G _ L O/I G _ _ at the end of the string and then taking a punt on Spike Milligan. I think I might have been fortunate in having a copy of The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (ODQHQ) as the resulting quotation is not easy to find on a Google search. Indeed the only reference to the quotation I can find on a Google search, as I write this on 28th May, is a pointer to a post in the last couple days on ‘Yahoo Answers’ asking if anyone knows the source of ‘Eight pounds ten for a second-hand suit‘.

Given that the quotation seems to be quite difficult to track down on the Internet, the description of it as a favourite quotation may seem a bit odd. However, we are only dealing with an extract as the full quotation is given in ODQHQ as ‘My favourite quotation is eight pounds ten for a second-hand suit” as said by Spike Milligan on an edition of the Radio 4 programme ‘Quote…Unquote’ on
1st January 1979.

The outside of the grid is presented below:

       LLIGAN EIGHTP
       I           O
       M           U
       E           N
       K           D
       I           S
       P           T
       S           E
       T           N
       I           F
       U           O
       SDNAHDNOCESAR

Whenever I do a puzzle like this I usually wonder how the compiler came up with the idea and this puzzle is no exception. Did the quotation come first or did the concept come first? I suspect the latter, but I can only guess. There is then the search for a suitable quotation of an appropriate length although I suppose that the size of the grid can easily be amended to fit the quotation. I have no experience of compiling but I doubt if it was easy to fill this grid given the constraints put upon the words that can be considered. As ever, I admire the result.

Although there were a lot of anagrams, the surface reading of many of the clues was entertaining and smooth. I particularly liked ‘Prehistoric creature, medium to very large, like a wild ox (MOSASAURUS) and ‘Does crooked son lie about income support’ (LIONISES) with its subtle use of ‘Does’ as the definition.

Another entertaining offering from Schadenfreude even though quotation was fairly obscure.

 A nice twist in a crossword with conventional clues (no misprints, extra words etc. to muddy the waters). The puzzle was made more difficult by the fact that I found the clues in the top half easier to solve than those in the bottom half, so the author only appeared late in my labours on the bottom line.

As soon as EUGENE O’NEILL had made an appearance, MOURNING rang the “Mourning Becomes Electra” bell, and it dawned on me that we were supposed to metamorphose  MOURNING into ELECTRA. Amazingly this metamorphosed all the crossing down words into other valid words, which must have taken some time for Dysart to compile!

O’Neill was indebted for his plot to AESCHYLUS, who appeared in the right hand column, minus his H, which had to be inserted after ELECTRA. The character hiding was ORESTES who appeared diagonally down starting at the O below the 14 square.

 Solving time : A very on-and-off effort. 2.5 hours altogether?

I nearly didn’t finish this puzzle. I was a page turn from giving up despite having completed the grid. I had no idea what the theme was and with a couple of ambiguous answers from the misprinted definitions I was uncertain that I had a correct grid. I reasoned that if I understood the theme then I would be able to resolve the ambiguities.

The preamble was a little confusing. Three local 32s and then several ways to get to them or with what they are associated. Why the multiple routes? If the 10 misprinted definitions are enough then why the 6 extra words. To start with I decided to ignore the theme and just hammer away at the clues. I managed to get all the answers due to the fair, if occasionally tough, cluing. My only error was writing in NERD at 15, seeing REN as a variation of RUN. This held me up on AINUS at 1 for longer than the clue warranted.

When I decided that 32 was WRITERS I wondered what ‘local writers’ could possibly mean. Local to where. So, the next step was to plug away at the misprinted definitions. There were a lot of ambiguities in these, deliberately I assume. For instance, I had Nard = Lard = GREASE (wrong misprint, wrong answer) and Old dish = Old dosh = BRASS (right misprint, wrong answer). When I finally got the first misprint as a J I had enough to guess at a phrase: JUST LOOK UP.

I spent the next few minutes looking up the vertical columns hoping to see something. I didn’t. Now, I often do the Inquisitor with a photocopy or scan of just the puzzle. Had this been the case here I would never have got this one. This time, however, I had the original but I had it folded in half on my crossword clipboard (yes, very sad). The penny dropped: JUST LOOK UP THE PAGE! I unfolded the sheet and, Yes!, three writers at the top of the page, the three games columnists—neighbours of the crossword setter.

So I got it, but only just. This would clearly not have worked as an online puzzle despite my desire to see the Inquisitor available online. I also take it that Lato would have needed Mike Laws to arrange for it to be published when the three standard columnists are up there. Over all an enjoyable if frustrating puzzle. I still don’t fully understand how all of the 6 extra words help, see below for tentative explanations, but hopefully someone out there will or the solution will make it clear.

Here’s the solution explained part by part, misprinted definitions first:

Six of these led to each of the three writers via a homophone, one very dodgy!—but the preamble warned about this, of their first name and an anagram of their surname:

The other four led to the games they wrote about via different word plays:

The six extra words are, I think: VICAR’S, PLACE, CLIMB, HILL, HELLO, HARRY. I think that as pairs they lead to the surnames, again, but I have two different interpretations, neither of which I am 100% certain about. In clue order these could be:

I just can’t quite tie these together so an alternative explanation is:

This is the one unsatisfying aspect to the puzzle for me, though it might be my stupidity or I might have messed up one of the extra words by misinterpreting one of the clues.

Finally, just to make things a little tougher, the clues to 3 and 4 were printed against the wrong numbers and 41 was 8 letters long rather than 7 as enumerated.

Solving time: about 2 hours

This was a nice example of a fairly gentle thematic puzzle. Extra words in clues are a fairly simple way of providing thematic messages, but the idea of using the central letter or pair of letters was a bit of variation from the usual first letter.

I made good progress with solving clues, and fairly soon had a few names of writers emerging - “C DICKENS” probably came first. I was then a bit stuck with about half a dozen clued answers left and the unresolved question of why eight names were linked with nine unclued entries. Looking at the unclued answers, I saw that CARDS, BLEAK, MIRTH and SLEEP all matched book titles with ‘House of ___’ or ‘____ House’, and that M Dobbs, E Wharton were also among the names - I couldn’t remember whether Wharton’s one was Mirth or Sleep. This led on to spotting that two of the nine unclued answers could be POOH CORNER. So the eight books are:

The House of the SPIRITS - I Allende
The House of SLEEP - J Coe
BLEAK House - C Dickens
House of CARDS - M Dobbs
The House on the STRAND - M Du Maurier
The House at POOH CORNER - A A Milne
The Fall of the House of USHER - E A Poe
The House of MIRTH - E Wharton

On then to the bit I sometimes struggle with - finding the phrase in the grid. The enumeration (10,6) made HOUSES easy to guess as the second word, and looking for this in the grid , I first found HOU in YOGHOURT, with SES as you turned west from the O. I then saw PUBLISHING, forming the rest of a house shape, and fairly soon saw the other (slightly different-shaped) house, using the BLIS in BLIST and SHING in SHINGLE. One or two quibbles and questions below.

Nearly forgot the last detail - explaining the title. Something you should always ponder for thematic barred-grid puzzles. In this case, a pun on “Random House”.