Inquisitor 1337: ‘Racehorse’ by Nimrod

35 comments on “Inquisitor 1337: ‘Racehorse’ by Nimrod”

1. Duncanshiell,
   I always love your blogs for the grid format you use to set out the clues and explain the answers.
   You are like Nimrod before he went over to the dark side, so you seem to know how his mind works.
   ‘Yearly’ was an odd one. Had to be the right entry but I couldn’t parse it. Like yours.

2. Hard work, but I enjoyed this. Only finished it on Friday evening – just in time to start the net one… Actually, I didn’t quite finish it as I had NEOPHILIAN in place of NEOPHILIAC and so couldn’t work out the parsing.

   I put DERBYSHIRE, not DERBY, under the grid. DERBY = race and SHIRE = horse. This seems to make more sense in that the preamble says the identity of the racehorse is generated by combining the two elements.

   Nice puzzle and thanks for the blog.

3. Oh, and I also had PENGHIA at 4d, with pang being the ardent wish (conveniently ignoring the -ly) assuming that if Ed couldn’t identify it then it didn’t matter that I couldn’t!

4. Presumably what is exceptional about the counties is that their county towns are no longer the towns they were named for (I thought Shropshire was in this group, but apparently Shrop is derived from Shrewsbury). This also had me heading on the wrong track for a while as I’d taken WILTON (for which Wiltshire was named) from WILT ON HIGH. I was looking for and ASTER to finish the LANC from PARLANCE.

5. After the first day we had only solved about 4 clues and we really wondered whether we would ever be able to complete the puzzle!

   Next day during each coffee, lunch and tea break we had another go and suddenly the penny dropped. It was a very satisfying solve which kept you working at it right until the end.

   The only clue we weren’t happy about was YEARLY – seems we were not alone. We didn’t enter (as usual!) but we wrote DERBYSHIRE under the grid because MATLOCK is the county town.

   Thanks Nimrod for a super puzzle and as ever Duncan, thanks for the comprehensive blog!

6. For the first time in many months I was completely stumped on the first attempt at solving this. When coming back to it I managed to solve a few of the unnumbered clues, but eventually found my way into the puzzle via 29a and 17d which gave me four of the five ignored letters. Remembering it was the Derby weekend, I then quickly deduced the “racehorse” and made steady progress thereafter. In the end I couldn’t parse YEARLY which I thought might be something to do with it appearing at the end of the list of unnumbered clues, and I failed to identify the county town allusion.

   Although I guessed the theme had something to do with Shire counties, I couldn’t find a list of 23 on Google. This had me looking for other connections such as ranks of nobility. I suspect my difficulty is that “shire” may be added inappropriately to some counties. For instance I live in Devon which is often referred to as Devonshire – is this in the list of 23?

   In the end this was just too much hard work to be enjoyable, but thanks Nimrod for the challenge and Duncan for explaining all.

7. All

   I found the 23 Shire counties here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire

   I can readily believe that the racehorse should be DERBYSHIRE rather than just DERBY given that the preamble does indeed say use the keyword!

   I had noticed that PRESTON had replaced LANCASTER as the County Town of LANCASHIRE but I have to admit not being aware that the other five had either changed their County Towns at some point, or at least had no nominal relationship between the County name and the County Town.

8. Re yearly I thought a “yearly” was probably an annual almanac, in which a nobleman would appear from year to year (so he’s literally-literally [regarding letters] in the yearly and also literally in it, if you see what I mean).

   I hit on Derbyshire/the Shire list surprisngly early, but it was still hours before I had a complete solution/explanation. Thanks to OPatrick for the info on Shrewsbury – I was looking for that instead of Aylesbury until very near the end. I was also trying to cram Par(lanc)e and Par(buck)le into the wrong lights for a long time until that penny finally dropped.

   Tough but rewarding, I found, and particularly impressive for the symmetry and the final entries all being words. And surely this one counts as maximum level 5 difficulty?

9. Like HowardL @6 I found this a mind-swimming blur on first pass but got into it via 29A and 17D which together yielded four of the five missing letters- I quickly deduced the missing letters had to spell out SHIRE and then it was a slow trudge through the rest of the grid.

   I parsed YEARLY as earl “in the sticks”, a reference to the situation of many an earl’s country home.

   Took me a while to see the anagrams of the towns but, like OPatrick @4 guessed they were all not the original county towns.

   Thanks Duncan for the excellent bloj and to Nimrod of course the entertainment. Great stuff.

10. First post for me on fifteensquared so, with a certain amount of trepidation, if offer ‘earl’ inside two ‘Y’s (betweenwise) as the positioning referred to in the clue.

11. Welcome to BF! Many more postings hopefully.

    You may well be right about YEARLY – it’s better than the parsing we had and is devious enough for Nimrod! Hopefully he will let us know later.

12. Well, if ‘betweenwise’ wasn’t Nimrod’s intended parsing for the clue he’d be a fool not to claim it was now. Very nice.

13. Thank you for the kind welcome Bertandjoyce and, as I should have said in my original post, many thanks to Nimrod for the puzzle, to Duncan for the excellent blog and to all the other people involved in fifteensquared.

14. Thanks Duncan@7. Of course, this was one of several links I found but I failed to read beyond the first paragraph. Perhaps that will teach me a lesson.

    By the way, I thoroughly agree with jonsurdy@1 regarding the format and explanations in your blogs – thanks.

15. This puzzle came out two days before I was due to take a ferry from Dublin to Holyhead and thence to Essex. I didn’t have much time to get stuck into it and I’d made very little progress by the time I met Nimrod for a sherbet (or two) on Saturday. He persuaded me to stick with it but unfortunately I still had very little time so I had to abandon it. 🙁

    There was another Inquisitor solver in the same sherbet shop on Saturday and she was equally flummoxed by the puzzle which Nimrod puts on his personal pH scale as a “2” – we figured it was more like eleven-and-a-half!

    Congratulations to anyone who finished it. And thanks to Duncan for the blog – I already thanked Nimrod (through gritted teeth!)

    I’m curious about the comments @1 and @14 regarding the format. As a bellow flogger I’d be interested to know what you particularly like as I strive to make my blogs more appealing.

16. Well, I found this one a real toughie and didn’t get too far at all I’m afraid. After staring blankly for some time at the unnumbered clues, I started to pick off a few. With the numbered clues, other than the NW Corner which started to take shape, I really struggled. A rather busy week which left me with much less time than normal resulted in a did-not-finish, my first for a while. That’s my excuse anyway…Happily it wasn’t all bad news this week as was lucky enough to be drawn from the hat for 1336.

    Thanks Duncan for the blog and very helpful explanations of where I was going wrong. This one definitely at the upper end of Nimrod’s difficulty scale for me.

    PS: Love the wordplay for ‘yearly’

17. If Nimrod thinks that was a 2 he needs to get out more…. Utterly impenetrable to this solver, though I have to confess to an insticntive dislike for the ‘letters ignored in wordplay’ type of clue, so I think I took against it from the start

18. Yes, another one that defeated me – the latest in several in a row now I’m afraid.

    In my opinion, IQ is definitely getting much, much harder and if this was only a 2 on the Henderson 1-5 scale, I don’t think I’ll be completing many more in the near future!

19. Only a 2??

    Ouch. There goes my sense of achievement, and most of my smugness too.

20. In response to kenmac@15’s enquiry regarding the format adopted by Duncan, I find it makes it easier for me to keep track of the clues and the construction of their answers. This is particularly valuable for IQ puzzles where there may be extra complications such as missing letters. Where clues and explanations follow one another in a list I am afraid I can sometimes lose track of which explanation belongs with which clue despite the bloggers use of colour coding.

    I suspect what format one likes is a personal thing and I seem to recall that it is the policy of this site to allow a diversity of formats. I’m sure this is the right policy.

21. Hi Howard @20,

    Ah, looks like you’re referring to the borders around the clues, entries, explanations, etc.

    As an experiment, I’ve just gone back and added a border to the across table in my blog for IQ1335 (I’ve left the down stuff alone). Click the puzzle number (above) to get there. Let me know what you think.

22. Very tough, but I got there in the end (although like many others I couldn’t parse ‘yearly’ and didn’t see the connection between the six counties, so thanks to those clever people who managed to work these out).

    Nimrod really does have the knack of writing the most infuriating/interesting/clever clues…it’s like each one has it’s own major PDM! And a 2 on the hardness scale???? Now that’s just taking the ****. I’m sure even HG would consider that worthy of a 3!

    Thanks to Nimrod and to duncanshiell…I must say that if I were a blogger, seeing ‘Nimrod’ as the setter might seriously tempt me to take a sickie.

23. I suspect that Nimrod’s comment re a “2” difficulty rating was perhaps tongue-in-cheek…

24. Hi kenmac@21

    The borders do it for me, but after a bit of research I see that my remarks regarding tabular form were a bit misplaced as far as IQ bloggers go – you all seem to adopt a tabular form of some sort. I must have been thinking more of the blogs for the daily Indy crosswords where tables are less common and there are six times as many blogs per week – which reminds me, I still have today’s offering from Dac to do.

25. Hi Howard, as a weekday blogger I’ll just say that what we post is entirely up to the blogger.

    We get much less time and most of us work, these blogs take some time to do and we have to solve it as well before blogging.

    If you look at the archives the styles have changed inordinately over the years, but it’s an ever improving process. Let us know what you would like.

    Having said that this was an absolute stinker as I’ve come to expect from John. 🙂

26. Definitely not a “2”! But not a “5” either (others have been a notch harder), so let’s say “4”.

    I recall only one other IQ puzzle with the same device of deficient wordplay – and, on checking, I discovered that it was John H’s “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” nuptial gift to jetdoc nearly 4 years ago. (Happy anniversary to you both.)

    I’m afraid I still don’t get YEARLY – even if the wordplay does involve ‘betweenwise’ (is that a word?) then where’s the definition? And I also thought that the clue for the unnumbered WENT was weak. But the rest was all fine & good.

    After consulting my Listener chum, we plumped for the ‘changed county towns’ theme but couldn’t explain the absent Shropshire/Shrewsbury exception – so thanks to OPatrick at #4 for elucidation.

    Good stuff from Duncan & Nimrod – thanks. (And the “race[-]horse” has to be DERBYSHIRE, despite the preamble being a touch vague here.)

27. @26
    OK I’ll settle for 4. I did finish it after all…

28. I didn’t get chance to do the puzzle unfortunately, but isn’t the YEARLY clue just a playful cryptic definition in effect meaning ‘from year to year’?

29. Just to clarify that, I think that the clue is basically saying that the definition = where ‘earl’ is in the answer(here). So, ‘earl’ is ‘from year to year’ and the definition is ‘from year to year’.

30. Nick @28 (& @29): that’ll do for me. Best explanation yet. Thanks.

31. Super blog Duncan and a brilliant puzzle, although I have to admit, through one thing and another, I never completed it. The man’s a genius.

32. Couldn’t really make headway into this — too many words I didn’t know, and I’ve always had trouble with incomplete definition puzzles. The only partial clue I actually managed that I knew I’d got right was archly (acly).

    Led astray by my tentative “lamp” for 3d, “peas” for 26d (“say” – “sounds like” things in the middle of “templar” = “p’s”; naah, doesn’t work, does it?) and “icicle” for 18a (don’t ask!)

    I did get Hum, Big Bands and Mendicants, but couldn’t work out why: in paticular MND for “Bardic comedy” I will now add to my mental toolkit!

    Right, now I’m off to get today’s offering.

33. “There was a RAM of DERBYSHIRE” … etc. Many of us will know the old Rugby song, and some of our Derbyshire solvers will even possibly have met the local girls vouching for its verisimilitude.

    Nimrod managed to get RAM twice into the grid, but he hasn’t yet admitted to me that it was intentional. I told him to lie, unlike the songsmith, if necessary !

    Incidentally, I too put DERBYSHIRE below the grid. I don’t see IQ till Sunday evenings so don’t know yet whether that was what was required, but it describes the title perfectly, (Derby + Shire = Race + Horse,) ?

    Difficulty ? 5

34. Have now seen the official solution notes and was very taken aback at what we were apparently expected to write below the grid, viz.

    RACE/HORSE: DERBY/SHIRE, with the latter underlined.

    I find that difficult to swallow, as “Racehorse” appeared as a single word in the title.

    Maybe the three lucky winners were the only ones to twig the right formula. One of the three is the evergreen RC Bell of Helston, who seems to have the Derren Brown touch when it comes to levitating envelopes out of the hat.

    I have been keeping a list of all IQ winners since December 2009, (having noticed a certain luminary winning five times in nine weeks around that time,) and RCB leads the field by several lengths, with no less than 14 wins since then, including three in the last eight puzzles ! With an estimated weekly postbag of c. 300, I have always assumed the statistical likelihood of one win every two years, and, for most names on my list, this is not far off.

    One of the strangest “coincidences” is when, on three separate occasions, groups of three names, IN THE SAME ORDER, were listed as winners in puzzles not too far apart … viz.

    1124 and 1133, 1138 and 1147, 1150 and 1163.

    And there have been twelve solvers who have been winners in each of two consecutive weeks.All very (RED) RUM ?

35. MND = Midsummer Night’s Dream

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