Inquisitor 1302: Post Mortem by Ifor

16 comments on “Inquisitor 1302: Post Mortem by Ifor”

1. We thought this was a real tour de force – even more so after reading the blog as we somehow or other missed all the references in the down clues. Our excuse is that we had 4 Inquisitors to catch up on after returning home.

   We sorted out which letters had to be removed fairly early on but eventually had to check our Dictionary of Quotations to find the quote. Once the grid was complete we looked and looked …….. and looked again. We eventually cheated and googled a particular site where we found a hint for the postcode. It all fell into place.

   Many thanks to Hihoba for the blog and Ifor for the puzzle. We apologise for ‘cheating’ at the last hurdle!

2. I thought that this was first-class with an amazing grid and some really good clues so thanks Ifor I look forward to your next.

   I am not a great fan of writing things under the grid though and think it much neater if the solution is contained within the grid. In this case I thought that the postcode was a brilliant idea and confirmation enough.

   Regarding 8d NIELLOS, there seems to be two schools of thought regarding subtrahends which are split but in the correct order – some view that a split indicator is necessary and others not, I am in the first camp so I am happy with the clue as it was.

   PS. A priest seems to have survived at 35a and a bar appeared after the R of GREGO.

3. Thank you Nick at #2. I have killed the remaining priest. The spurious bar will remain for the present – it would be a seven stage process to remove it, and hopefully it is not too important!

   I take your point with regard to NIELLOS, “parts of” suggesting that the C and the E are removed separately. I still don’t like it very much though.

4. Offending bar removed!

5. Many thanks to Ifor and HiHoba

   On the whole I enjoyed doing this but found it strangely unsatisfying, I think for two reasons.

   First, there was no big PDM. The preamble pointed strongly towards a quote with a religious connection and, like Hihoba, I got ‘Interspinal’ early and worked out the missing PRIEST letters. Having recently re-watched the TV History of Britain series by Simon Schama (who discusses the actual validity of the quote) it had stuck in my mind so I got that too quite quickly.

   Second, there were too many ‘esoteric’ across words, such as those around bug-hunters and their ilk for me. Some great clueing in the some of the other across clues – I particularly liked ‘Offset Printing’, ‘Tapestries’, ‘Slipstream’ and ‘Accipiters’ (which as a ‘birder’ I knew) one of which keeps raiding our garden at the moment !

   Not disputing having ‘esoteric’ words, just seemed like a slog uncovering them for me….sorry Ifor but thanks again.

6. A splendid puzzle and very thorough blog. I did this with a friend and solving the grid wasn’t too much of a problem, partly because the rubric with its reference to deconsecrations and such made me guess the ‘turbulent priest’ quote before I’d even looked at any clues.

   However, we were completely stumped by the ‘coded location’. We did guess from ‘deconsecration’ that the X might be involved, being the most cross-like letter, but failed to intepret ‘post’ in the title.

   Also we were sent off the track by a rather amazing red herring. Becket was canonised three years after his death in the church of S. PIETRO in Segni. This can be ‘coded’ in the same way as the across clues by removing a turbulent priest, leaving simply O. So having rejected the X, we were keenly looking at all the Os.

   The title’s seeming reference to something *after* death, the S. PIETR-O coincidence and the requirement for a year (1170 just seemed too obvious …) conspired with the obscureness of the postcode to put us entirely off the track. So I must chalk this up as a near miss.

7. Superb puzzle. Tremendous Penny Drop Moment with the postcode trick. The only downside was taking ages to get episternal after the “deconsecration”. Perhaps he could have helped us a bit more with that definition, but google confirmed the “shell” connection in the end. I thought it was going to be Septrional – a nicely poetic and more familiar word, but I can’t find it in Chambers. I wonder if that’s why he didn’t use it (it seems to be a corruption of “septentrional” or is it vice versa?). I only noticed a few of the hints late on but maybe they helped unconsciously. A great tour de force. I only hope John Henderson doesn’t now come online and say “Well that one rates 3 out of 5 on our difficulty scale, hope you enjoyed it…”

8. A masterpiece. There was so much thematic material that it was more like a story told in puzzle form (although hindsight was required to fit it all together).

   I had two sublime PDMs…first because I got the missing letters in the across clues, but worked out that ‘sprite’ was missing from each, and that the quote was from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (something about ‘each grave yielding up a sprite’…seemed to fit with post mortem), and this sent me on the wrong track for hours (or was it days!). When I realised it was ‘priest’, and it all slotted into place, I wanted to run into the street and hug the first person I met. And second, when I got the postcode which was, if anything, even more satisfying! So much pleasure for £1.60!

   I certainly agree with Herb @7…this rated a 6 out of 5 for me (for satisfaction as well as difficulty).

   Many thanks to Ifor and Hihoba

9. Thanks for the blog Hihoba. I echo the above comments about how accomplished a puzzle this was.

   Fortunately I spotted the turbulent priest in the acrosses very quickly & the grid filled fairly quickly – though I did (like Hihoba) use Chambers word wizard for several of the taxonomic acrosses since I’d recognised that’s what they were & had the anagram fodder – if I’d had to search through Chambers looking at likely possibilities I might have shared RobH@5’s sentiments on the number of obscure words with 6+ unchecked letters. & I couldn’t parse STATEPRISON – thanks Hihoba for a new word to me – epris.

   I liked the endgame – unusually for me the idea of a postcode came almost immediately & after a quick google I identified where to deconsecrate but it then took ages for me to realise that the reason it worked was the cell number completing the postcode.

   A hugely enjoyable puzzle overall.

10. Tumbled to [PRIEST]* after three across answers – but two or three others at the end took quite a while. Impressive grid construction (but with several entomological …PTERISts). Alas for me, after a frustrating 24 hours struggling with the endgame, I requested a helpful hint … and was given a postcode nudge.

    (Not sure what role “men” was playing in the clue for 38a, but the clue for EDIT at 29d was a touch of class.)

11. I read 38a as ‘Reaction, to old men’ (men of old) Archaic word.

12. Agreed that this was a lovely puzzle – the postcode trick proving a novel change from the norm. But, at the risk of sounding picky, what was the point of adding the date? I may have missed something, but there was no obvious correlation between the date and the puzzle (contrast adding the location, ‘decoded’), and it would have worked in the same way if we’d had to add, say, the victim’s name or the speaker’s. A mere cavill – it was a lovely PDM.

13. My thanks to Hihoba and all who commented. A few responses: I accept that if you happen to know the quotation then across clues are made easier (although I hope still challenging) and that bughunters were prolific – my excuse is that there aren’t that many PRIEST words to play with. And the date inclusion was to deal with the (admittedly very remote) possibility that the grid could in theory be filled without the priest / Becket connection being recognised – I think the original sprite misreading mentioned above illustrates the point. I certainly enjoyed trying to work as many religious / thematic references as possible into the down clues.

    Ifor

14. Terrific puzzle, Ifor, but are you seriously saying that you think there was a remote possibility that a solver could fill the grid and highlight the postcode of Canterbury Cathedral without recognising the priest/Beckett connection?

15. Yes, Nick, I am (but I reiterate “very remote”) I’ve not checked but I imagine the L to R reading around 12 is the only one that yields a feasible postcode – one with religious connections – that would satisfy a hypothetical solver ignorant of Becket. Put it down to paranoiac belt-and-braces if you like; you’ll agree that requiring the date does no harm, at any rate.

    Ifor

16. I got the “priest” but quite fairly early on, having got interspinal, blisterplaster and offset printing — I was always looking for a clerical reference, and “turbulent priest” jumped out at me. It was the down clues which stumped me — again, a handful I never got and was never going to get. Quite a lot of the across clues fell to an on-line anagram solver (I have no particular interest in insects or the names of those who study them so several of those I had to put down as a learning experience). As for the final location, best I could do was find a group of letters near the bottom that spelled “altar” when you mudge them up — but ultimate defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. Too many words I’d never heard of.

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