Inquisitor 1938: Christmas-time at Hook-a-Gate by Pomfret Cake

We enter the run-up to Christmas with Pomfret Cake’s IQ challenge.

The preamble:

In our Shropshire village, six visiting pranksters have each meddled with a clue answer in a manner suggested by their respective names. Four other members of the group are given by corrections to misprints in the definitions of all but three other clues. The rest of them are hiding and should be highlighted. Solvers should write their collective name (2 words) under the grid. Unchecked letters in unclued entries can form (given GRABS CANDLE) “Beggarly Ned’s a cad”. Letter-counts refer to grid entries, word-counts to clue answers. All entries are real words and phrases; one is an abbreviation; one may be confirmed online.

As usual, having taken note of the ways in which the clues and answers must be treated, we dive in to start solving. Our first one in was 4d – which didn’t seem to need any ‘treatment’, then 14ac, 3d, 7d and 7ac (all with misprints) and we continued to make steady progress, gradually enabling us to make a stab at identifying the four ‘pranksters’ whose (very odd) names were to be revealed by the misprinted letters. We were stumped by quite a few clues, partly due to the rather convoluted surfaces necessitated by the misprints and the uncertainty as to how the pranksters had meddled with the solutions.

The names generated by the misprints did not mean anything to us, so we had to resort to the internet to find the theme – The YULE LADS. We had never come across these 13 Icelandic mischievous figures before, so we learnt a little about Icelandic Christmas-time folklore and the names of the 13 pranksters. The misprints spelt the names of three of them:

SHEEP-COTE CLOD, GULLY GAWK, STUBBY and WINDOW PEEPER

This enabled us to figure out where the misprints might be in the clues that we had not solved, and to identify the answers that might need to be altered as a result of the pranksters’ meddling, eventually establishing that:

SPOONER at 9ac is changed to SNOOPER by SPOON LICKER – with ‘licker’ as an anagrind

SKYRING at 15ac is changed to ING by SKYR GOBBLER

SAUSAGE BASSOON at 44ac is changed to BASSOON by SAUSAGE SWIPER

UNPOTABLE at 6d is changed to UNABLE by POT SCRAPER

BOWL OVER at 22d is changed to BLOW OVER by BOWL LICKER ‘licker’ as an anagrind again

PANDOOR at 26d is changed to PANDORO by DOOR SLAMMER – ‘slammer’ as an anagrind this time

The unclued entries at 23 and 25 across read: -R-LA and L-PP-LU-I. The preamble states that the unchecked letters can form (given GRABS CANDLE) “Beggarly Ned’s a cad”. We figured out that we have to take the letters of GRABS CANDLE away from BEGGARLY NEDS A CAD, leaving us with G, Y, E, D and A as the unchecked letters. According to folklore, the Yule Lads are sons of GRYLA, an ogress, and her third husband LEPPALUDI. Having been rather confused by the need to take GRABS CANDLE out of the anagram, we realised that perhaps it offers a clue to one of the other pranksters: CANDLE BEGGAR. Is the choice of ‘HOOK-A-GATE’ as the ‘location’ in the title a hint to MEAT HOOK, the second of the other pranksters? The third is DOORWAY SNIFFER.

So, DOORWAY SNIFFER, MEAT HOOK and CANDLE BEGGAR are hiding. This is where we had some real difficulty and we spent hours looking at the grid to find them. We wondered whether DOORWAY SNIFFER could possibly appear as ROUTE SNOOPER, but we’re not convinced that ‘doorway’ and ‘route’ are synonymous – Chambers has ‘route’ as a synonym for ‘door’ in the sense of ‘opportunity’, so perhaps that’s what Pomfret Cake has in mind? In the end we resorted to ‘phoning (emailing!) a friend’, who mentioned that the the preamble says that the three remaining pranksters are ‘hiding’ and should be highlighted. We had of course assumed that they are hiding in the grid – but our thoughts above turned out to be right on track! They are not hiding in the grid –

DOORWAY SNIFFER is ‘hiding ‘ in plain sight in the clues for 27 and 29 down – highlighted in the parsings below

MEAT HOOK is ‘hiding’ in the title of the puzzle: Christmas-tiME AT HOOK-a-Gate

CANDLE BEGGAR is ‘hiding’ in the preamble: … (given GRABS CANDLE) BEGGARly Ned’s…..

An extraordinarily mischievous misdirection by Pomfret Cake! But such a relief to have finally found the last three lads!

The answers which have been meddled with are highlighted in the completed grid below

The misprinted and corrected letters the definitions are in bold in the parsings below.