Comments on: Inquisitor 1112: Shifty Characters by Phi

By: duncan shiell

duncan shiell — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:59:43 +0000

i thought this was an excellent puzzle with a number of penny dropping moments.

I got my first inkling of what was going on I could see that PHILBY fitted at 6 across, but I had to resort to research to learn about the codenames.

The next key moment was when I realised that all clashes were on the diagonal and I could insert CAMBRIDGE FIVE along the whole diagonal. From this I could deduce that clues with answers off the diagonal were normal.

My favourite Inquisitor of 2010 so far.

By: Hi of Hihoba

Hi of Hihoba — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 06:29:40 +0000

An excellent puzzle which I found “challenging”. As usual with Phi it was scrupulously fair. I found the RHS easier than the left and had half a puzzle for quite a time before spotting Philby and Burgess. I then had to do some rearrangement to fill in the diagonal, which gave me a lead into the LHS where I found Maclean and Cairncross. I didn’t sort out all the shifted letters until the grid was almost complete!

By: Richard Heald

Richard Heald — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:34:40 +0000

An excellent idea beautifully executed as always by Phi. I expected this to be much harder than it was and solved 30-odd clues cold before even starting to fill in the grid. Like HolyGhost’s, my PDM was spotting the real entries at 6 Ac and 9 Dn, but I needed good old Wikipedia to get all the real names and cryptonyms. My only gripe is that the SHIFTY example given in the preamble led me (wrongly) to assume that the letters had to shift by 3 places in each case.