Inquisitor 31 – On a swim by Kruger

Solving time: ages!

The only previous Kruger puzzle I remember was about No. 6 in the Inquisitor series, based on the Offa’s Dyke footpath and associated places – one that I found pretty tough and was quite relieved not to be writing about.

This one proved even tougher for me – I ended up using things like the anagram and full text searches in the CD-Rom version of Chambers to solve about half a dozen of the clues and get some momentum going. My aim for Inquisitors and similar puzzles is to just use the dictionary itself if possible. For puzzles like this one, this approach works if I can guess what the title means, or spot the misprint phrase from contributing letters, or see a common feature in the answers that need ‘processing’. None of these happened for a long time with this puzzle, but eventually, I did spot the pattern – answers that needed changing seemed to include CATAMARANS, GUARDIAN ANGEL, PETULANT and PURITAN. What do these words have in common? A female name – Tamara, Diana, Petula and Rita respectively. With OBI as a sequence of letters near the end of the misprint phrase, the penny dropped when ‘La Donna e Mobile’ came to mind and matched up with the other misprint letters – it’s the title of an aria from Verdi’s Rigoletto, usually translated as “Woman is fickle” – hence the anagrammed title “On a swim” from “Woman is”. Making appropriate anagrams of female first names in 10 answers allows them to fit the intersecting words, and once I realised this, finding the other anagrammed names took very little time. Lesson from this solving experience: if the title is baffling, try making anagrams out of it and see if they suggest anything. Also: try not to get too spooked by the setter’s name just because of one tough puzzle – I shouldn’t really have made such heavy weather of this one.