Inquisitor 1828: Night Follows Day by Karla

14 comments on “Inquisitor 1828: Night Follows Day by Karla”

1. ‘Lates’ is fairly common parlance for ‘late shift’ or ‘night shift’.

   I felt the same about the woven clues. I suspect most solvers just ploughed through and solved the clues somehow without resolving the wordplay.

2. An interesting one, this. All thanks to Karla and HolyGhost. Not hugely difficult but tricky — some of the “woven” clues like (for me) 4D and 24D took a while to reverse-engineer even when the answer seemed fairly clear. Happily, all that ravelling and unravelling made me think of PENELOPE and see a place for her in the grid before I was sure of the SHROUD or LAERTES.

3. Many thanks to Karla, I had high hopes following the previous cinematic puzzle and really enjoyed this. Far less daunting than it initially appeared and I thought that the “day-time” clues were very cleverly done. Similar to HG, it took me a while longer to work out what was going on with the “night-time” set. I worked out 8 of the day time clues, but didn’t persevere with the remaining 3, sorry.

   Surely not a fluke that the Ravels are all linked? I assume to represent the ‘unpicking’ of the thread?

   Also, this is very pedantic, but I think for 41a the correct clue reads “One stone…”, rather than “Stone one” as this is in keeping with how the weaving works elsewhere (although the wordplay works either way).

4. I loved this one: the more you solved, the more you wondered what could be going on. It was maddening: how to make sense of the weird parsing, and then (when you understood – sot housing Dutch was my way in), why does shifting a couple of letters forward (or backward) constitute daytime?; why are there so many ‘v’s, and then when you understood, why does Ravel suggest the night?…. So when, late on, I finally thought to google Laertes and shroud, the dropping penny was loud and immensely satisfying (and a big relief). Many thanks to Karla and HG

5. Kippax @3: regarding ON SET ONE, you can move the ST a couple of characters to the left to get STONE ONE, or one character to the right to get ONE STONE; there are weavings similar to either style among the other “day-time” clues.

6. HolyGhost @5: I don’t think that is the case. Once the weavings begin (some of their start midway through a word e.g. 19a) all of the letters involved are alternated. There are no examples where any move more than one character away from their starting position.

7. Oops. Some of *them* start midway through a word.

8. … and that should be 18a as an example of “weaving” beginning midway through a word. Argh!

9. I thought this was excellent with so many different layers to (ahem) unravel.
   I also found the parsing of the day-time ones complex and like Kippax managed 8 out of 11 before giving up, having successfully entered the answers anyway.

   My only thought was that I would have swapped ‘day time’ and ‘night time’ designations around to have a positive statement rather than a negative, which I found confusing. So rather than ‘undoing the night time treatment’ before solving it would have been ‘applying the day time treatment’.

   For example, 6a should be a Day Time clue because Penelope adds RAVEL during the day time (as we need to do). As opposed to it being a night time clue where we need to reverse the unravelling before solving (= double negative).

   Not that it makes that much of a difference though to a great puzzle – thank you all.

10. Sorry, Kippax @6, but in 1a SHOOT USING is corrected to SOT HOUSING, with the H moving past the the first O in SHOOT and also the terminal T; or am I missing something?

11. For most of this solve I was patting myself on the back for spotting the Macbeth theme – sleep “knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”, and there was “sleeve”, right in the middle of the ravels… When I finally realised what was going on it was a good PDM, although it involved looking up Laertes, who I had confused with Laius, Oedipus’s father (after looking for a Hamlet theme too).

    The ravelling and unravelling clues had to be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt. Penelope doesn’t exactly “ravel” the wool/shroud, and alternatively if you take the “daytime” action to be “weaving”, that isn’t really what’s been done to the clues either. It didn’t really matter though, the conceit still works for me. I do like arnold’s suggestion, even if it does mean we still have to accept that Penelope is “ravelling” at her loom during the day. The more I think about it the more it seems to work in a kind of poetic way.

    Shakespeare doesn’t help, as that Macbeth quote seems to treat ravel and unravel as virtually synonymous. Classic Will.

12. HolyGhost @10. I’m struggling to explain what I mean here, apologies! I think I’m right in saying that the structure of the weaving is the same in all cases, with affected letters becoming woven alternately. I see what you mean in saying that the H can be seen to move past two letters in 1a, but the way that I was visualising these at the time of solving was almost like a loom (in keeping with the theme). If you think of one set of the affected letters moving upwards, while the other set remain where they are (sort of like if you put one hand above the other and interlink your fingers). Which means that for 41a, the S and T of “On Set One” don’t move ‘backwards’ over the first ‘On’. Does that help?

    I realise that this is micro-level stuff but I thought it was worth mentioning in the first place as it seemed to me to be an example of how clever all of the clues were, using that same process throughout. Perhaps someone else can elucidate it more clearly!

13. Funny thing about ravel, that it can mean to become entangled/woven and also become disentangled/unwoven.
    I agree with Kippax’s analysis.
    If you take the two original words before treatment, eg JEWEL raised, then move them together and interweave the overlapping parts you get JEW rEaLised. Every example follows this pattern, as does ONE stone > ON sEt one. However STONE one > ON SET one does not.

14. I agree with Kippax and James: my intention was On Set One ‘unweaves’ to One Stone which is the consistent device across daytime clues.

    I had to pick one of two ways here; either ‘weave’ and ‘unravel’ the clues for the solver to reverse. Or ask the solver to ‘weave’ and ‘unravel’. That would have been fine I think with the same device used both ways: only I quite liked using RAVEL as a different device. And I liked the idea of RAVEL strings being woven together which I still think looks quite nice in the completed grid. Plus the red herring of Ravel the composer, to go along with the other red herring of Shakespeare’s Laertes. There are many ways to weave a shroud, I guess.

    Those woven clues were rather tricky to put together and I mightily regretted the rod I had made for myself halfway through. At one point I nearly unravelled the whole thing into the bin. But one must persevere. Penelope did, after all.

    All-in-all, rather mind-boggling so thank you everyone for putting the time in and for the comments today. A more straightforward challenge awaits in the IQueue.

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