Inquisitor 1954: Top Dog by Shark

The Preamble:

Different groups (a) – (e) may be deduced in different ways: (a) unclued entries make up the largest; (b) from each column except the first, a single letter must be copied into the bottom row (affected entries have normal clues and real words would be formed were the letters to be removed); (c) extra (single or double) letters given by wordplay in remaining clues; (d) the penultimate is revealed by reading the first letters of normal clues; (e) the extreme example must be highlighted (19 cells, symmetrically placed) after filling in the remaining blank cell.

Well, that made a lot of sense didn’t it?

This is Joyce compiling the blog after a very long break – if you read my Phi blog for last week, you already know that Bert fractured his kneecap after tripping over some wood. The one thing that he could help with was blog compiling as he could sit down and put his crutches to one side! Now that he is mobile, I thought it was about time that I helped out. 

There’s only one way that we can tackle an IQ with such a confusing preamble – start solving as best you can and hope that the penny drops fairly quickly.

Some of the NW corner thankfully was filled fairly easily and Bert noticed the possibility of LEOPARD in the grey cells. He then laughed when he realised that RHINO would fit as well. I then said that ELEPHANT could also go in the grid without having any of the crossing letters. With a few more cells filled in the NE corner we also guessed BUFFALO and LION.

A quick ‘investigoogle’ (thank you Rabbit Dave for the delightful word!) revealed that these five animals were known as THE BIG FIVE (group ‘a’)

That really didn’t help us that much though. It wasn’t until we had almost filled the grid, that we realised that we had some errors in choosing the extra letter(s) and there were a number of clues where we had the answer which we hoped was correct but no idea on the parsing.

We thought it may be worth trying to see which letters could possibly be copied into the bottom row to see if they made sense. When we had loads of  consonants apart from a possible E near the end, we took a break!

Returning to the puzzle we tried to make sense of the extra letters and worked out that they could be ROOSEVELT, CHURCHILL and STALIN. Another ‘investigoogle’ gave us THE BIG THREE (group ‘c’)

Sorting that out enabled us to work out group ‘d’, the first letters of the normal clues: spelling TITLE DAI DI CANTONESE. That didn’t make much sense until yet another ‘investigoogle’ informed us that THE BIG TWO is a Cantonese card game called Dai Di (or Chor Dai Di) – it is also known as ‘Top Dog’ – the title of the puzzle – and thankfully nothing to do with the library book I am reading at the moment by Jens Lapidus.

We then returned to solving and parsing the last few clues that had evaded us. 37 was tricky as you had to take the first letters of 3 words and then discard one of them. The last one to be sorted was 12d. We had never heard of CLEM before – losing the first and the last letters for different reasons was particularly awkward. We had also never come across ‘the’ = ‘so much’ (adv) either.

So, we had THE BIG TWO, THREE and FIVE. THE BIG FOUR (group ‘b’) was not related to an Agatha Christie novel, accounting firms, Big Tech companies or banking but the four British railway companies in the period 1923-1947. Across the bottom there was GWR, LMS, LNER and SR – the ‘copied’ letters are highlighted in the completed grid below right. Such a shame that EMR weren’t around at that time, as we are both Station Adopters for two local EMR stations and they are a great company!

That left THE BIG ONE. Not the UK’s largest angling consumer event but a ROLLER COASTER at the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool – highlighted in the completed grid below left.

We lost count at how many times we reread the preamble, trying to make sense of it all. It wasn’t until the very end, on our final reading that THE BIG FIVE being the largest group made sense.