Enigmatic Variations No. 1411: All Aboard by Gaston

It seems that Gaston has lost a few pieces of his jigsaw in ALL ABOARD – maybe down the back of the sofa, or the dog ate them?…

(There does seem to have been a spate of jigsaws in the barred thematics (EV, IQ, Listener) recently – including this one’s predecessor, EV 1410. A commenter there suggested that jigsaws ‘should be the exception rather than the rule’, but I guess that if the editors are receiving lots of jigsaws because setters are setting lots of them, then they will have to publish them more often?…)

Anyway, back to this puzzle – the preamble states that:

“Clues are presented in alphabetical order of their answers and must be entered where they fit. Numbers in the grid refer to the seven unclued entries. Entries 1 and 7 must be shaded appropriately, thus completing the theme, whereas entries 2-6 are ALL ABOARD. In each clue the wordplay leads to the answer and a single superfluous letter; in clue order these letters give hints to entries 2-6. On completion of the grid, solvers should also highlight the two most important missing elements in the theme (11 adjacent cells). Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.”

There are 54 entries, of which 7 are unclued – a fairly hefty proportion for a jigsaw, but at least Gaston has been kind enough to indicate where they go! A quick analysis of word lengths also suggests that it would make sense to focus on the two 13s and the two 7s to start with, as it should be fairly quick to place them once the crossing letters have been identified…

All well and good in theory, and the two 7s did fall quite quickly, but the 13s eluded me for a while, and I pressed on with solving as many others as I could to build up a bank of candidates, and also try to get a handle on those extra letters.

My usual method with a jigsaw is to list out groups of word-length under-scores, and fill them up as I go along, so I then have all the 3s, 4s, 5s etc. all together. I also write the corresponding word lengths around the perimeter of the grid, to help when looking to fit in a 3, a 4, a 5 etc.

Once I had the 13s THUNDERSTRUCK and MONOCHROMATOR, to place the 7s AEROBOT and NOISIER, I could start putting a few more in the grid and start ticking words off my length lists. And at last there was a multiple-ish PDM when I realised that 5 looked something like SNOWY, 2 looked something like HADDOCK, and the extra letters were starting to form what could be ‘IDENTICAL DETECTIVES’. Blistering Barnacles! – we are in Tintin territory. And 1/7 then had to be (RED) RACKHAM’S TREASURE (Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge).

The detectives THOMSON and THOMPSON and Professor CALCULUS presented themselves, and the important missing elements of HERGÉ and TINTIN weren’t too hard to track down:

For all my initial trepidation over missing pieces, this puzzle proved to be a bit more amenable than it originally looked – three of the unclued answers were fully cross-checked, and the others only had a maximum of two un-checked letters. The clueing was nicely varied – some quick ‘write-ins’, like the anagrams for NOISIER and AEROBOT, ASIDE from (R)AISED, and OVID from DIVO(T); some a bit more devious, like ARB. for arbitrageur in ARBOUR, and the LE(W) (tepid) of RULE – and all made a little harder by having to think about that extra letter…

A lovely puzzle, thank-you Gaston – evoking childhood memories of (re-)reading the Tintin series. I couldn’t discern any particular anniversary or other significant date to do with the book, or Hergé himself – maybe there is, or maybe Gaston was just paying homage to an old favourite…

NB. I was most disappointed that I couldn’t find ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’ amongst the well thumbed set of Tintins on my bookcase (next to the similarly-sized and cherished ‘Asterix’es!…) I did find ‘Flight 714’ and ‘Destination Moon’, so maybe these will get a re-read in the near future…