Enigmatic Variations No. 1052: Mixed Doubles II by Kruger

Did anybody get a really tough jigsaw for Xmas – the kind that you start and then realise you’ve bitten off a bit more than you can chew, with everything else that’s going on at Xmas, and it sits around being worked away at through most of January? I didn’t…but this puzzle, which came out on 12th night, as the decorations were being taken down, more than made up for it – certainly the hardest EV I remember having to blog for a while. Got there in the end, and hugely satisfying, but a tough workout!

The premise – and the preamble – was simple enough: Each clue was actually 2 clues woven together, with the four constituent parts – two definitions, two sets of wordplay – appearing in any order. To add to the mix, punctuation can be ‘misleading’, so wasn’t going to help with the splitting up of the clues.

So, we have a series of tasks: work out the split into the constituent parts; solve the resulting clues; then fit them in where they will go (the ‘jigsaw’, although each word can only really go in one of two places).

In itself, that would have been a reasonable EV challenge, but Kruger adds a twist to the tale: eight answers must be ‘thematically repaired’ before entry. But in what way? More later…

Where to start? I scanned the clues for a while looking for definitions or wordplay that might jump out – definitions that obviously fitted the enumeration; anagrams or abbreviations or combinations of words that looked like they went together. It took a few passes, but some answers started to drop out, which helped to pin down the other clue of the pair – FLEA and HATE; COIR and BOLO; ANTI-WAR and BEWITCH; EAST and <something>. The penny started to drop with FIREPLACE and <something> – which implied that FIREPLACE and FLEA probably started at the top left – but then neither COIR or BOLO would fit at 6D.

And so on – as more answers were winkled out, more clashes became apparent – so the key was going to be what ‘thematically repaired’ meant. I tried to see if pairs of answers could be split into sub-words and re-paired: FIRE + PLACE swapping with <some> and <thing> – but that seemed too complicated. I then tried ‘re-pairing’ pairs of letters – so if the IR of FIREPLACE was swapped to become RI then ROOT would fit at 2D – but the possibles at 3D/27D didn’t have a corresponding ‘I’. I then decided that maybe ‘repaired’ meant just jumble up those 8 answers to fit the clashes – but it wasn’t obvious what letters went in the unchecked cells – e.g. the L and one E of FIREPLACE needed to go in unchecked cells – but which ones?

By this time my working copy was in such a sorry state that I started again, with a clean copy, and ignored any clashes – just putting in letters where it seemed that they must match, leaving those clashing and unchecked cells – and somehow it jumped out at me – the middle of (F)IREPLAC(E) became (F)REPLICA(E), (A)PIAR(Y) became (A)PAIR(Y) etc. – so parts of the 8 words were anagrammised to give words related to doubles or pairs – REPLICA, PAIR, TWICE, TWIN, COUPLE, DUAL, MATCH, CLONE.

Wow – I certainly needed the extra week that we seem to have recently been granted on the prize submission dates for EVs.

All in all – a serious workout, at the harder end of the EV scale, for me at least. Once untangled some those clues were still pretty hard to get, and the denouement was long and drawn out! Thanks to Kruger, and I hope my fellow solvers enjoyed it as much as I did (in the end!?). From the title I guess that Kruger has produced a similar puzzle in the past – MIXED DOUBLES I? – but I couldn’t find any evidence within the 15×15 site. I just hope it isn’t my turn to blog when MIXED DOUBLES III comes out…

(Flashing grid thanks to ‘kenmac’ – by jove, I think he’s got it…at last!)