Inquisitor 1225: One Down by Schadenfreude

This puzzle had quite a long preamble, as follows: ‘Initially the filled grid will contain seven consecutive empty cells.  One letter must be removed from the answers to 20 clues and the residue used to form a word or proper nouns for grid entry, in seven cases without rearrangement.  The removed letters provide an instruction.  All entries in the final grid are real words or names or phrases, including a well-known brand name.  Those experiencing difficulty may be rescued by 21 down’.

It soon became clear that the length of entries indicated by the clue did not always match the number of cells available for the answer.  This helped identify clues that would have a letter removed from their answers before rearrangement as entries.  This logic generated 1, 12, 15, 16 22, 24, 28 and 38 across, together with 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 30 and 31 as answers to be thematically adjusted.  I had noticed a 2 cell mismatch between the answer length (4) and the available cells (6) at 42 across, so this has to be a different type of clue, but my brain didn’t kick in particularly effectively at that stage.  Lack of attention also suggested that 23, and 26 29, 33 and 35 down were in the thematic adjustment class, although I am sure everyone else noticed early on that the one cell difference between answer length and available space for these was in the wrong direction.

I was well into the solving process before I realised the errors in my logic at the lower end of the grid.  Solving RAI at 35 down and PERFECT at 23 down gave me the clue to where the seven consecutive empty cells were going to be.  Knowing that Schadenfreude is usually scrupulously symmetric in his puzzles, it was fairly easy to deduce where all seven cells would fall.  The symmetry also suggested that there might be seven cells in the  top row that could be significant.  By this stage I had enough letters in the top row to discern the potentilal for TITANIC.  I also had an inkling by this mpoint that CENTENARY was going to be the entry at 1 down.  From this point the identity of all the thematically adjusted answers became very clear and the solving progressed fairly quickly towards the completion of the initial grid.

The 20 clues that required adjustment were

The message spelled out SINK SHIP – INSERT DEBRIS

At this point the grid looked like this:

Applying the first part of the message was fairly clear – TITANIC had to be moved to the space in the bottom row.  A little bit of thought and some inspection of possible new words at the top soon generated FLOTSAM (goods lost by shipwreck and found floating on the sea) as the word to be inserted in place of TITANIC in the top row.

The final grid looked like this

A number of words were changed as a result of the sinking and strewage of the wreckage.  We had:

This was a very enjoyable puzzle which just got better as it went on.  As in all good puzzles, there was misdiection aplenty.  We expect it in the clues, but here we had the consequences of adjusted words and blanks overlapping.  We also Schadenfreude’s ability to generate two stages of a grid where all the entries were words even though 18 of them changed between the intermediate stage and the final stage.  I wonder how long Schadenfreude took to construct the grid.

I didn’t really use the fact that there were seven cases of adjusted words without rearrangement although I have noted the seven in the first table in the blog.

Schadenfreude seems to be keen on anniversaries – two of his previous three Inquisitor puzzles also focused on anniversaries.  Inquisitor 1198 dealt with the 25th anniversary of the Independent newspaper and Inquisitor 1207 was built around the 100th anniversary of Amundsen reaching the South Pole.

I don’t find Schadenfreude’s clues easy, but I always find them parsable once I have got the answer.  Sometimes the answer comes through the definition, sometimes through the wordplay.

There were a few words that were new to me, but there were also many that I have seen in barred crosswords before.  I struggle a bit with the spelling of BAHREIN at 24a but the E is required.

There were three clues in a row – 5, 6 and 7 down where the wordplay involved taking the last letter of a word, but to criticise is nitpicking on my part.  I couldn’t write a decent clue at all.

The title of the puzzle – ONE DOWN – was revealed as CENTENARY