Inquisitor 1557: Wall of Sound by Nimrod

22 comments on “Inquisitor 1557: Wall of Sound by Nimrod”

1. The stones group are foreign language words for stone, and STEN is Swedish.

   I didn’t know ‘sen’ meant ‘without’ (or ‘lacking’) in music, so I solved STEN using an obscure band member named STENS, who loses the S (‘s lacking’) to make the unreduced word STEN, but that would make this a poor clue.  Your version, Duncan, is elegant and must be right.  I cheekily got the T for the anagram not from STEN but from EATS, because ‘EA’S is a more correct representation of ‘heats’ in Cockney (using a dropped H and a glottal stop for T) than ‘EATS.  I have no doubt, though, that the setter intended EATS as an unreduced answer and SEN to be the reduced answer at 1d.

   I know this setter (as Enigmatist) for his excellent Guardian puzzles, but this is my first attempt at an Inquisitor by him.  I found the puzzle more challenging than most and, unusually for me, I couldn’t fully parse all the clues that I solved. As a result, I couldn’t be sure of all the ‘ignored’ letters or all the bricks, and I made little sense of the ‘message’ while I had only 13 of the 16 letters. I extracted 14 bricks for the wall, enabling me to identify four ADRN anagrams for one group and four Swiss cantons for another. I guessed the other two groups were lions and stones from what I had, and when I went back to the grid the two remaining ‘bricks’ finally yielded.

   (The Swiss towns are actually cities: I described them as cantoins, but BASEL is not a complete name.  There are two cantons: Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft.  STEIN is the red herring that actually belongs to the ‘stones’ groiup.)

   I thought the message had to be an anagram because it couldn’t be anything else. I was lucky to get the name LEONARD BERNSTEIN as quickly as I did, especially as I had one letter wrong and another as ‘?’. When I looked again at the bricks the four key words were impossible to miss – and they were one from each group, as stipulated. What a revelation! The significant anniversary then made the completion of the endgame a straightforward task.

   I appreciated the wit and ingenuity that went into many of the clues, and I enjoyed solving them every bit as much as unravelling the theme. I didn’t quite finish but was satisfied having got all the thematic elements.

   Many thanks to Nimrod for this well-constructed, mind-bending anniversary piece (for a composer and conductor whom I much admired) and to duncanshiell for the blog.

2. A great Inky! Thanks duncansheill and Nimrod.

3. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

4. I agree it was a good standard of puzzle, with all the instructions very clear etc. I did not bother with the anagram, rather got the name from the wall entries I had (after a bit of ill fated mucking about with Bernnard). The puzzle also happily fills the gap left by the current break OC is having, after seemingly being on constantly for a while there! Many thanks!

5. Not easy but very pleasing when it all worked out. Particularly liked LURGI as a starting point for the familiar (if only in crosswords) LUR. I saw the lions first; had some trouble with STEN as a stone but found the Swedish or Norwegian link in Wikipedia; got the name from the wall and eventually (after a bit of reverse engineering based on needed letters) managed to confirm it with the anagram. It was a relief to be able to do this without ever having watched Only Connect!

   All thanks to Nimrod and duncansheill.

6. Good fun to be had all round, aided and abetted by a bit of fortuitous (?) scheduling on BBC 4 the same evening of not only a programme about Bernstein, but Elsa the Lioness too. I failed to complete the list of Swiss towns – for reasons that elude me now I had BAR rather than BASEL as the last member of the group. If I squint I can sort of see how I misread the parsing of the former, but the latter, well, that was just plain stupidity. Grid completed nevertheless, and the appropriate entries highlighted.

7. Super puzzle, I filled the grid and sorted the words though I failed to get the BERNSTEIN connection at the end.  I got distracted by SWISS STONE LION leading me to The Lion of Lucerne monument to the Swiss Guard which was very interesting but wasted a lot of time and got me nowhere.  I expect that having seen Only Connect! would have helped as one would know what sort of thing to expect from the endgame.  Thanks to all.

8. Dash it all I put STEM instead of STEN! No idea what I was thinking there.

9. I enjoyed this to a point. I’m a big fan of Only Connect (or is it, secretly, the host VCM??) and can’t wait for its return in October.

   However, we spotted the Leonard Bernstein stuff very early on. I think it was when we changed the unjustified ONE IN A MILLION to ONE IN A HUNDRED (justified much later) that we remembered that Leo would have been celebrating his 100th.

   Thus we managed to find LEO, NARD, BERN and STEIN without having fully completed the groups. Maybe indicating the complete groups below the grid should have been a requirement or maybe that would have been a step too far.

   Having said all that, it’s always satisfying to complete a Nimrod puzzle and I especially enjoyed the ‘er indoors clue.

   Thanks S-er and B-er.

10. BTW, Duncan, don’t you mean NIDE in 3d? I can’t see how/why/where NOËL fits. 🙁

11. I must admit, once I realised the ignored letters were not spelling out a helpful hint but were all a-jumble, I lost heart and never arrived at LB. More or less filled the grid, got the anagrams and the Swiss cities, but there were too many semi-parsed or unparsed answers for me to be confident about the rest. Deciding 2 down was ‘atrii’ didn’t help, though I did eventually see it. I now see some of the clueing was rather brilliant.

    Many thanks to Nimrod and duncanshiell. Incidentally, I never thought the admirable Denis Lavant would make it to the Inquisitor. He’s also the star of a rather famous music video I happened to be see last week:

    https://vimeo.com/9572603

     

     

     

     

12. Duncan, with reference to Kenmac @10, there are a couple more oddities in 2d (À ROUÉ) and 5d (DÉJÀ) where what you wanted to put has ended up as a perfectly valid accented word, but not the right one…

13. All v.g. as far as I’m concerned.  I needed help in parsing (n)ATION -> ONE IN A HUNDRED and didn’t see where GOA came from until I read the blog – so, thanks for that. And to Nimrod of course.

    Duncan: to complete those mentioned @10 & @12, I think there’s a wobble in 4d (should be NAR<) as well as 2d, 3d & 5d.

14. Great puzzle – very challenging – thanks to B & S.

    I entered STEN but couldn’t parse it (incomplete STENDHAL?) and I found a reference to a GOA STONE so I used GOA as my fourth stone…although I then couldn’t explain the last T in the extra letters!

    Moot point – if I listed GOA in my ‘working notes’ on my submission copy, and couldn’t explain all the extra letters, but I actually got all the grid entries and highlighting right, and arrived at LB anyway, does my submission count as correct?! I really want that box of chocolates, although I preferred it when the prize was Champagne (before it became Prosecco)…

15. Sorry about all the typographical nonsenses a 2d, 3d, 4d and 5d.  All corrected now.  I’m not sure what happened there.  4d was a simple missed letter, but I’m a bit baffled by the ones with accents, especial the NOEL in place of NIDE.  I’ll look closely when inserting accented letters in future.

16. Duncan: for some reason the table has “ORIGIN (Japanese Shinto temple gateways.” as the entry for 2d instead of TORII.

17. Goodness only knows what I was doing when writing 2d to 5d – ORIGIN corrected to TORII now.

18. Relieved to see corrections. Whilst the puzzle remains beyond me I do look at the answer each week and had thought when looking at the down clues mentioned that this weeks offering was a further step  into the unknown.

19. Seeing ‘Nimrod’ always gives a sense of trepidation, but also the near certainty of a highly rewarding challenge. A huge amount to enjoy here, sometimes gratuitously obscure in places (25A, 3D?), sometimes not so gratuitous (8D?). Some stand-out clues as ever: ‘er indoors was brilliant, when I finally clicked who the mystifying Mrs Daley could be, and I smiled at the ‘one in a hundred’. The only one I gave up on parsing was GOA, and I still don’t like it – the jump from ‘wasting no time’ to ‘go ahead’ just seems too tenuous. It’s certainly better than my best effort though, which was to have ‘go at’ as a synonym for ‘wasting’ (in the sense of attacking and destroying) – that definitely wasn’t right.

    I wouldn’t want them every week, but Nimrod’s puzzles are a key fixture of the IQ. Thanks all round.

20. 14a must be a Clue of the Year contender. Whether or not it’s Ximenean, I have no idea.

    If one was being really picky (unlikely, I know, for a crossword solver) one might point out that Nimrod has been inconsistent in his spelling of Swiss cities. BASEL, BERN and ZURICH are in German speaking areas and are all given in their local, German, form. GENEVA is French speaking, but is given in its English form. To be consistent it should be in the local French form GENEVE, but he’s the editor so he must have approved this 🙂 [I’ve omitted diacritics as they are not normally used in crosswords].

     

     

21. Terrier @20

    What adds weight to your argument about consistent naming of Swiss cities is the fact that the last letter of GENEVA is unchecked and might as well have been E as A.  However, it is the name of the spirit that we enter at 5d rather then the name of the city.  It is only when we build the wall that we group the name Geneva with the names of the three other Swiss cities, and I’m not surprised that the editor allowed the setter that small liberty.

    I’m not sure about your Clue of the Year, though.  It demonstrably works – in a Ximenean way, as far as I can tell from the analysis – but ‘poetic country’ was the only way I could possibly solve this clue, and I know I’m not the only one!  What sort of GK or SK is assumed for these clues?

22. Alan B @21 – Minder, the program featuring the character Arthur Daley and his permanently off-screen wife known only as ” ‘er indoors ” was hugely popular in its day and certainly qualifies as a candidate for general knowledge.  Its has been in more-or-less constant showing somewhere on the TV schedule since its first episode.  You can still watch them repeated on TV now, 25 years after the original showings.  Next episode is tomorrow on ITV4.

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