Enigmatic Variations No. 941 – The Sign of Four by Salamanca

A fellow EV blogger recently mused on the ‘blogger’s nightmare’ of being allocated a puzzle he/she can’t get to the bottom of. Well, here’s an example (unless the penny drops some time between writing this up and posting it!)… The preamble talks of ‘the most abstruse cryptogram’, a ‘seven percent solution’, signs, gifts and interpretations linked to the theme of ‘FOUR’, and some ‘imaginative’ picturing of items in the grid. It all turned out to be a FOUR-pipe problem, far from elementary, and defeated my best efforts at detection.

It was not all doom and gloom – I filled the grid, researched/worked out the underlying references, and enjoyed some fiendish and clever clueing. But, I was unable to make the imaginative leap to identify the sign/symbol, or find the hidden items in the grid – hopefully the ‘Comments’ section below will soon yield the final pieces of the puzzle. Please check back later, if enlightenment has not yet arrived…

To give Salamanca his or her dues, the title was an explicit reference to the underlying work, The Sign of (The) Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the text of which is fairly easily findable on t’web, if you haven’t read it, or don’t have an ACD anthology to hand. And the two types of substitutions in the grid soon became clear:
– any light containing the word FOUR – I found six, crossing at three locations – needed these four letters replaced by a ‘sign’ of some sort.
– and four other clues, lacking definition, and explicitly indicated as 1st of 4, 2nd of 4 etc., led to the surnames of characters from the book, replaced by their forenames:
JONATHAN (SMALL)
MAHOMET (SINGH)
ABDULLAH (KHAN)
DOST (AKBAR)

The reference to a ‘seven percent solution’ diverted me for a while – were solvers to leave some (most) squares blank, leaving only 7% of them filled? In the end, I deduced that this was just a quote from the book, referring to Holmes’ drug use/addiction: ‘He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said, — “a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?”‘

As for that abstruse cryptogram? Another quote from Holmes in the book gives plenty of material to work with: ‘“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”‘ (How wonderfully put – one for my next performance review at work!)

Despite much staring, up-down-left-right-diagonal-spiral searching, head scratching, and rewriting/re-filling of the grid, I just could not work out which items of the gift – problems, work, intricate analysis? – were being referred to, let alone how I could ‘imaginatively picture’ them together in the grid. I also failed to work out the ‘sign’ to be substituted for the word ‘FOUR’ in those three squares.

There were a few little niggles which didn’t really help – word length 7 instead of 6 on 11D, no word length on 16D, and 17A might read better with ‘scuppers’, rather than ‘scupper’? – but I had most of the grid filled in less than an hour, the book characters substituted soon after – and then repeated efforts over the rest of the fortnight at getting across the final line…so far in vain.

So, ‘thank-you’ to Salamanca, for giving me work and problems. I hope my intricate analysis is of use to some readers. This mental exaltation was anything but dull routine, and I am off to make use of some artificial stimulants (though nothing quite as strong as Sherlock’s)!