Enigmatic Variations No. 1263: The Creeping Man by Jaques

The preamble to THE CREEPING MAN states that:“One letter must be removed from each clue before solving; in clue order, these identify a group of people associated with THE CREEPING MAN. Having completed the grid, solvers must perform a re-enactment by deleting what was frequently deleted (9 letters) and entering what was entered.”

Short and sweet – all clues equally affected, and nothing else to do until the grid is complete…another thing that struck me was the spacing of the clues and the general whiteness of my printed copy…until I checked the grid and worked out this was ‘only’ 11 by 11, with 33 clues. Hopefully I’ll be putting in a shorter shift than some 13×13 or 14×14 EVs, with up to 50-odd clues…

But, never mind the width – feel the quality…those pesky extra letters were sometimes hard to track down, and I made slow-ish progress, including a fair amount of looking up once the wordplay and crossing letters had thrown up likely candidates – ANASTIGMAT, HAUSTELLA, TYRAN, SHILL…

As for the extra letters, they gradually gave up the phrase ‘THE COMMITTEE TO RE-ELECT THE PRESIDENT’, which meant nothing to me first off, but might to people with the right cultural and political references. With the US having recently been through a pretty horrible election, I wondered if it was a recent thing, but it turns out to be from the Nixon era – just before my own cultural references – and refers to a nefarious bunch of people fundraising for Nixon’s re-election, whose activities led to the Watergate scandal in the early 70s. That long phrase was abbreviated to CRP, but satirised to ‘CREEP’.

I should have checked the diagonals much earlier, schoolboy error, but down the leading diagonal we have EXPLETIVE, and the phrase ‘expletive deleted’ turns out to come from the Watergate saga – when Nixon tried to redact all the swearing in the transcripts.

What was entered (by the investigators) was the WATERGATE building, and entering this instead of the deleted EXPLETIVE gives us a completed grid of real words, although I can’t verify that they are all in Chambers 2016, as I haven’t shelled out for a new one since 2012 or so…

So, thanks are due to Jaques, for an interesting and educational solve – I certainly wasn’t aware of the origins of the phrase ‘expletive deleted’ before this, although I was familiar with the phrase itself. And as mentioned above, your blogger was grateful for the relative brevity of grid size and number of clues!

(The preamble didn’t explicitly state that the removal of letters from clues always left real words – this isn’t always the case when this device is used, but I think it was here, which make the exercise all the more impressive.)