Ifor usually presents us with challenging puzzles. This was no exception.
Preamble: Clues are presented in alphabetical order of their answers, which must be entered normally and where they will fit. When read in clue order one thematically-placed letter in each clue to the 20 six- or seven-letter entries spells out the names of a songwriting duo. Two lines from one of their compositions (one of which contains its title) will assist completion of the grid, including the unclued non-word in the central column.
A jigsaw: often quite fun. “… one thematically-placed letter in each of 20 clues …”; hmmm – to find the theme, you need the names; but to find the names … (Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards, Simon & Garfunkel, Leiber & Stoller, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Gilbert & Sullivan – none of them with 20 letters, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Saturday morning, and I’m on a 1-hr. train journey to London for ‘the march’; when I disembark I have a meagre smattering of answers. Saturday afternoon, and I’m on a 2-hr. train journey to Bury St Edmunds for the birthday party of some friends; when I disembark my answers-per-hour rate has not improved. Sunday morning, and we have a 3-hr. drive back home; when we arrive I have doubled my answer score. All in all, not much to show for 6 hours’ solving.
I probably did some more later on Sunday, and I got quite excited on Monday evening when I’d solved all the 5-letter answers – unfortunately none of them intersected. OK, Tuesday evening, and I finally justified PARTITA (which I’d had for ages) and that completed all the 7-letter answers, which did intersect! And I was off, entering the answers that I had to what seemed like a little over half the clues.
I had some free time during Wednesday, so thought I could make serious inroads. The bottom right was done, the top right & bottom left half done, and <<< blogus interruptus: I’m writing this whilst sitting under a large mulberry bush in the garden, and a blackbird has just dumped on the puzzle and on my keyboard. Back in a mo … >>> the top left was pretty vacant. I had confidently placed SEROON, ANTICK, & BAILEY in the bottom right quadrant, but when I was about to pencil in ENTICE halfway down the left I realised that that and ANTICK were interchangeably located. No matter, that would be easily resolved later. But wait a minute – it looked like BAILEY & SEROON could also fit on the left of rows 1 and 5. Uh-oh. (Indeed they were interchangeable with TAILED & MERTON. It was a day before I would notice the AUGUST/HUGEST ambiguity.)
The grid was full, and I was then about to waste an awful lot of time. I carefully sorted the clues into conventional order and began to hunt. But with 4 ambiguities there were 16 possible orderings of the 20 clues I had to inspect. I looked at first letters, last letters, initial letters of nth words, middle letters of clues – they all had an odd number of characters which didn’t seem likely to be a coincidence – but all to no avail. How frustrating. (I am getting a bit fed up with Ifor at this stage.)
Just before leaving work on Friday (yes – I had wasted two days) I recalled Ken’s advice to a novice solver in his blog last week: when you’re stuck, re-read the preamble; when you’re really stuck, read it again; if you’re still stuck, READ IT AGAIN. Aaargh! It doesn’t say “when read in normal clue order” BUT simply “when read in clue order”. What an idiot!
Can’t wait to get home and have another crack at this. Sure enough, the middle letters spell JOE EGAN & GERRY RAFFERTY. (I am friends with Ifor again.) Baker Street comes to mind, but that was a solo effort, so I resort to Google. Up comes the band they were in: Stealers Wheel, which checks out with the title of the puzzle. Their best-known hit is Stuck in the Middle with You, which checks out with the thematically-placed letters in the clues. The refrain is “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, // Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.” So SETTER/SOLVER completes the central column, and we just have to sort out who are the Clowns and who are the Jokers. Chambers has ANTICK and AUGUST as clowns, so they go on the left (with ENTICE & HUGEST on the right – not jokers but that is simply too much to ask). Paul MERTON and Bill BAILEY are stand-up comedians, but that’s close enough for me, and they go on the right; so, TAILED & SEROON on the left, and we’re done.
Thanks Ifor … what a work-out.
• indicates clues with six- or seven-letter entries
| Clue | Answer | Wordplay | |
| Spots name in one | ACNE | N(ame) in ACE (one) | |
| • | Sharpness of wit banjaxed upper-case name | ACUMEN | [UC (upper-case) NAME]* |
| Willing to accept absolute followers having the power | AMENABLE | A(bsolute) MEN (followers) ABLE (having power) | |
| • | Odd figure lost before delayed payment | ANTICK | AN (before) TICK (delayed payment) |
| Fool while doubling back | ASS | AS (while) with last letter repeated | |
| • | Glorious few weeks of the year | AUGUST | double definition |
| • | Defensive barrier in reserve, covering base after trouble | BAILEY | BY (in reserve) around E (base) after AIL (trouble) |
| • | See comedies failing after money runs out | DIOCESE | [COMEDIES]* ¬ M(oney) |
| • | Draw unimpaired after abandoning rule about clubs | ENTICE | ENTIRE (unimpaired) ¬ R(ule) around C(lubs) |
| Head back to last of the rations | ÉTAPE | PATE< (head) (th)E | |
| Made up of a number of each length, staying at the place indicated | ETHEREAL | EA(ch) L(ength) around THERE (at the place indicated) | |
| Stirring up cause of unhappiness | EVIL | LIVE< (stirring) | |
| Old boy’s ban often changing to being expelled | FEN | [OFTEN]* ¬ TO | |
| Persistent seeker of old friend with king in custody, backing return | FERRETER | FERE (friend, archaic) around R (king) RET< (return) | |
| Old doe after raising offspring | GET | TEG< (doe, obs) | |
| Presents provided in great numbers at last | GIFTS | IF (provided) in G(rea)T (number)S | |
| • | What improves nap? One gram in a little quantity of liquid (2 words) | GIG MILL | I (one) GM (gram) in GILL (a small measure) |
| • | Most famous sides in training use holidays for relaxation | HUGEST | [T(rainin)G U(s)E H(oliday)S]* |
| Content to compile a log concerning obstruction | ILEAL | (comp)ILE A L(og) | |
| Leaders in Islam managing all main services | IMAMS | I(slam) M(anaging) A(ll) M(ain) S(ervices) &lit | |
| • | Sugar – perfectly unreactive, very filling | INVERT | INERT (unreactive) around V(ery) |
| Begin to work after being turned on | LEG | GEL< (begin to work) | |
| • | Borough polled returns, with boundary for local areas almost going ahead | MERTON | NOT< (polled) after MER(e) (boundary, dialect) |
| • | Foolishly obstinate after losing in a call to witness | OBTEST | [OBSTINATE]* ¬ IN A |
| Local firm rejected one case when completely unboxing instruments | OCARINAS | (l)OCA(l) (f)IR(m)< (o)N(e) (c)AS(e) | |
| • | Suite of interest to young child’s letters | PARTITA | PART (interest) ITA (initial teaching alphabet) |
| • | Become less severe regarding time spent dieting | RELENT | RE (regarding) LENT (period of fasting) |
| • | Madness following withdrawal of troops into country | ROMANIA | MANIA (madness) after OR< (other ranks) |
| Where ships often sail close up without a capsizing (2 words) | SEA LANES | SEAL (close up) + SEN (without) A rev. | |
| Army unofficially responsible for section of arsenal | SENA | (ar)SENA(l) | |
| • | Hamper before one’s fluffing run-out in the middle | SEROON | [ONES]* around RO (run-out) |
| • | One side originally reflecting planet shifts | SIMARS | I S(ide) rev. + MARS (planet) |
| Sense of disappointment when receiving marks | SMELL | SELL (disappointment) around M(arks) | |
| • | Skilled shot on skittles aimed towards the top | SNIPER | RE (on) PINS (skittles) rev. |
| • | Docked in port of Liverpool, harboured by high afternoon tide | TAILED | L(iverpool, leftmost letter) in [A(fternoon) TIDE]* |
| Draw close by pulling strings, perhaps | TIE | double definition | |
| Entire bats, not one made of wood | TREEN | [ENTIRE]* ¬ I (one) | |
| Loyal supporter turned rebel out over hiding unionist (2 words) | TRUE BLUE | [REBEL OUT ¬ O(ver) U(nionist)]* | |
| • | All turn round in the hall for theological council meeting | TRULLAN | [ALL TURN]* |
| Pressure after test cut possible cause of infection | TRYP | P(ressure) after TRY (test) | |
| • | One springtime in the country passed without information | UNWARE | UN (one) WARE (springtime) both dialect |
| Prompt removal of opponents after leader’s liquidated | URGE | (p)URGE (removal of opponents) | |
| Progress with a word of agreement | WAY | W(ith) AY (yes) | |
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Yes, this was a really strenuous one — the toughest so far this year? I felt pretty sure I wasn’t going to finish but finally saw the middle-letters thing (embarrassingly late in the week). Never heard of the duo, the band or the song, so fervent thanks to Google as well as Ifor and HG.
My way into the jigsaw began with tentatively putting ACNE and ASS in what turned out to be the right places, and building from there. Phew. Of course, not having got TAILED at that point, I soon had BAILEY pencilled in at 1A …
Yep, that was most definitely on the tough side. Getting enough of the answers to begin filling the grid took an absolute age (I managed to get all the eight letter entries, and worked from there), but then finding the songwriting duo took about as long again, and then where to put the ambiguous entries (one of which I managed to place correctly totally by accident 🙂 ). For once Wikipedia failed me, as they weren’t listed in the songwriting partnership entry. I did know the song, which helped, but the lyrics are easily available via Google anyway… Satisfying to finish, and definitely up there as one of the toughest IQ’s of the year (to date!)
The hardest IQ for a long time. If there was a way to work out the placing of the duo’s letters without guesswork, I couldn’t see it. After all, “stuck in the middle” wouldn’t emerge until you got the duo and then the song, and you needed the duo and the song to get “stuck in the middle”. Chicken and egg scenario? Luckily the “banjaxed” in the first thematic clue stood out as an unusual word, and as the J was in middle of the clue that seemed like a reasonable idea to work with. Once I’d got JOE it was over to t’interwebs, and after following the red herring of Joe Strummer for a while it all became clear.
I wasn’t sure whether the left and right were from our point of view or the character in the song’s, but went for the former and am glad to see that it was correct. Did anyone else worry about this?
I wasn’t confident that I’d got the final grid correct, due to the non-symmetrical placing of the jokers and clowns. Although I like both Bill Bailey and Paul Merton, their presence seemed at odds with two antique words for clowns and I wondered if I should be looking further. So I guess I completed this more by luck than judgement.
A good workout, and thank goodness the grid had bars to compensate for the lack of enumerations!
Funny, isn’t it? One man’s meat and all that!
I didn’t find this one too taxing even though it’s a jigsaw. Of course, I had help from elmac who doesn’t fear the unnumbered grids as much as I do. Between us we’d solved a fair amount of clues and she proceeded to start whacking them into the grid, which didn’t take too long to complete – except for the ambiguous entries, of course. Extracting the middle letters also wasn’t too painful, especially with the BANJAXED assistance. Job done by Sunday afternoon, if I remember correctly.
Stuck in the Middle with You is a favourite song of mine and I knew that Gerry Rafferty was involved though I’m not sure I’d heard of Joe Egan. Of course, many people associate it with a particular scene in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs:<a href=”https://youtu.be/XIMg2Xw4_8s”>here</a>.
Or, rather, here.
Admin edit: Some people may find the content of this link upsetting. Please do not follow it if you are squeamish.
Very satisfying to have completed this and hats off to Ifor for managing to get the middle letters into place but still keep the clues making sense.
@3 – I also struggled whether the setter was ‘looking outwards’, so to speak, from the grid and we were therefore reversing left and right but eventually settled on HolyGhost’s conclusion – whether that’s what Ifor intended, only Saturday will tell!
I think putting a link to that sick and disgusting scene from a film on a website like this is wholly inappropriate.
Solo, this would have been beyond me. I completed my first jigsaw last year and noted with trepidation the lack of any long answers that would make entry easier. Fortunately, Kippax was willing to team up and I was able to contribute a few answers over the course of the week. Entry only started on Friday night but having all of the 7- and 5-letter answers allowed me to complete most of the right hand side very quickly.
I had also wasted a lot of time during the week trying to work out the songwriters. I made multiple errors here (all my fault): first, mistakenly believing that the letters would be in the answers not the clues; then after turning to the clues assuming that they would have to be reordered to match the positions of the answers into the grid. Late on Saturday evening I realised that there had been a lot of futile effort! I finally found the central letters through counting the length of each clue and finding that they all totalled odd numbers: that had to be important. Like others have noted, ‘banjaxed’ was a very odd selection for anagram indicator and that also helped along the way.
All in all, tough going, but fun and satisfying to complete (with assistance!).
And re: the link @5. I’d agree that the link to the scene should at least have come with a health warning! (I can well recall watching that for the first time…I’m not great with blood and had to pause the VHS to have a break 🙁
Not my cup of tea.
I was initially put off by the lack of word-length information in the clues, but after completing the following week’s Chalicea in good time I decided eventually to take the plunge with this, limiting my ambition to at least discovering the theme.
I managed to solve a third of the clues (15 out of 43) ‘off the page’, which is as much as I could reasonably have expected of Inquisitor clues with no help from the grid and no word-lengths to guide me. Not surprisingly, none of my answers could be entered in the grid at that point. In the absence of any ‘crossing letters’, I would have needed a collaborator to make more progress with the clues. The only other way forward was to guess the songwriting duo.
I guessed the duo incorrectly – I’ve never heard of the one I was supposed to find. I therefore couldn’t guess the song either. I judged that there was no more fun to be had with this puzzle and decided to come gracefully to a stop.
I actually enjoyed solving those clues that yielded their answers. I liked ACNE, DIOCESE and INVERT very much, but the clue for RELENT jarred as it did not indicate ‘Lent’ properly.
By quite a margin this was the least satisfying of the ten Inquisitor puzzles that I have attempted, and I will remember Ifor’s name. I’m glad at least that some people enjoyed it. I’m the ‘novice solver’, by the way, referred to by the blogger in the context of the good advice given to me last week by kenmac. I have attempted 10 Inquisitors in all, of which I have completed five, come close with three, was defeated by Schadenfreude, and got virtually nowhere with one by Ifor.
Thanks to blogger and commenters.
Alan B @9 5-8 out of 10 sounds a pretty good strike rate to me. When I started out with these (2012) I was delighted to complete 10 in a year!
Alan B @9: in Chambers under the headword Lent it gives “any period of fasting”, which I felt was close enough to what’s indicated in the clue.
bingybing @6 & probably others (regarding LEFT & RIGHT):
When Francis Bacon asked a friend to destroy one of two paintings in his studio, he said it was the “one on the left”. Bacon meant when you have your back to the paintings; the friend took it to mean when he was facing them. It is estimated that the painting would have been worth about £35m today.
HolyGhost @11
I was aware of the Chambers entry (which accords with what I thought I knew!). I maintain that ‘fasting’ is not close enough to ‘dieting’. It is possible for fasting to be part of a diet, but to connect that with Lent is a far-fectched idea, IMO, and I would not have clued ‘Lent’ (in RELENT) in this way.
I think most of what I’m going to say will echo parts of what’s been said above already. I thought it was on the harder side, but not so difficult – or wouldn’t have been if I could count. I got a fair few handful of clues in the first session, but it didn’t feel anything like enough to start piecing them together, given the absence of longer words. However, like David L @1, I had a lucky punt on ASS and ACNE and things fell into place remarkably quickly, though there were a few clues that held out for a while – and looking at my scribbles now, two that I still hadn’t parsed (OCARINAS and PARTITA – I’d somehow missed ITA in Chambers, having seen and rejected the ita palm, if I remember rightly) so thanks for clearing those up.
After a few minutes of failing to read the preamble correctly, so looking for relevant letters in the answers, and then a few more minutes looking at first, last, penultimate, 6th, … letters, I eventually thought to count the number of letters in the relevant clues and the 1 in 524288 chance seemed likely not to be a coincidence! Unfortunately, I miscounted the number of letters in from the start of the very first clue, so I quickly rejected Aoeeg… as a likely name and spent longer than I should have trying to work out what combination of orders for the clues when read in normal clue order gave a more name-like sequence. Unsurprisingly, it turned out none of them did.
I got there in the end, but was also frustrated by Wikipedia’s failure to mention this particular duo. I was also slightly dissatisfied at the end to find, I thought, only one clown, but I just assumed the construction was hard enough as it was and that Ifor had had to accept this compromise. Should have known better than that. I hadn’t though to look at vertical clues and August didn’t exactly jump out as a likely clown. Fortunately, I had HUGEST and AUGUST in the right places, but only by chance.
Over all, an enjoyable challenge, though perhaps more of an intellectual satisfaction rather than purely pleasurable experience.
Sorry, John H, but this was just too much for me. It seemed that Ifor had swallowed the dictionary but I was the one with indigestion! Apart from the expected obscure words as answers, there were quite a few in the wordplay, making many of the clues especially difficult when I did not know how many letters I was looking for and had no cross-checks to assist. I managed to solve 26 of the 43 clues but only achieved one complete set, namely, the 5-letter words (snap, HG). I made a stab at pencilling in part of the top left corner, which turned out to be correct but did not have enough for any more. Having neglected my duties, threw in the towel.
Had the clues been a little more generous, allowing me to fill the grid in a reasonable time, I think I would have enjoyed the endplay and PDMs. As it was, this was the first time I can remember giving up with a completely empty grid (and I have been doing the Inquisitor since before it was so christened!). So, congratulations to those above who persevered and succeeded and particularly to HG who had a real challenge this time.
Thank you, Chalicea, for restoring my confidence with a heavenly diversion, finished within 24 hours.
As always, my thanks to blogger (an accurate and thorough exposition, if I may say so) and to those who commented. I was pleased to see that the inclusion of the rather unlikely “banjaxed” (and perhaps the stress on the centre column) had the intended effect of pointing solvers towards the relevant letters. And I’ve noted HG’s rueful point about “clue order”. As he generously admits, the misinterpretation was his, but in future I will seek editorial approval for “as they appear” or some such, should space permit.
Regular solvers will know that the editor seeks to cater for all tastes and degrees of experience by offering a range of difficulty over a consecutive set of puzzles; this was the challenging one from the current batch, and I hope won’t deter solvers from tackling anything of mine that might appear subsequently, or indeed the IQ in general.
Ifor
When there was a vote on this site for the best puzzles of 2017, I put three of Ifor’s in my top four. This one will be definitely be a contender when we review 2018.
Like other contributors above we found this hard work, but we persevered because we suspected from the intro that the theme would be of interest. We swapped answers with Terrier@8 during the week to save us both some time, but were well short of a critical mass until the Friday night, when I sat down alone to give it a serious coat of looking-at and got on a bit of a roll. As I recall, it was getting GIG MILL (hitherto unknown to me) which finally allowed a bit of tentative insertion and then the dominos fell fairly quickly and after about 90 minutes I had a full grid, including the central column. This suggested a song about “me and you”, but I had no idea who the songwriters were or how to resolve the interchangeable pairs of answers.
Again like others, we had spent a lot of time before we filled the grid trying to make famous songwriting pairs fit a 20-letter pattern, using various combinations of surnames, forenames, initials and “and”, but we drew a blank. The nearest we got was Carol King Gerry Goffin, before we remembered that Ms King (originally Klein) is called Carole. We then wasted even more time looking for the significant letters in the answers, before at some point on the Saturday Mrs T re-read the intro and realised that we should be looking in the clues. Worse, we then set off on another wild goose chase by looking at the clues in conventional grid order. We never thought of looking at the central letters, but even if we had they would not have made any sense.
Finally, after putting it aside for a while we got lucky on the second Sunday. I was doing something else but the puzzle was on the table in front of me and as I glanced at the grid “Stuck in the middle with you” came to mind. I know the song well and with Merton and Bailey highlighted on the working copy it was clear that we’d cracked it at last. So no more trawling through the clues required, just a bit of dictionary checking so that we could send in the clowns correctly, and a quick online out of curiosity to see who collaborated with Gerry Rafferty on the song.
Finally, if I may be permitted a personal anecdote in the style of Murray Glover, I NEARLY saw Stealers Wheel once. I was at Newcastle University in the early 1970s and they were booked to play at the ball in my hall of residence at the end of the 1972-73 academic year. They had been booked well in advance of course, but when “Stuck in the middle” entered the singles charts in May 1973 they found something much more lucrative to do and pulled out. They were replaced by a local band called Beckett, who I’ve never heard of since.
In my previous post, for Terrier read Kippax. He made a similar mistake earlier!
I filled the grid except for TAILED or MERTON. I had a couple in the wrong place, but unless you get the theme there is no way to know.
I spent a couple of hours trying to find which letters to select for the songwriters but gave up. One thing that put me off was that I was not sure what to count: should one only count letters or should one count the punctuation, and what about the spaces between words? There seemed to be far too many possibilities to go hunting blindly hoping that something would turn up. I hadn’t heard of JOEEAGAN either so I may well have overlooked that string of letters even if I had tried the right strategy.
All in all a great puzzle but too hard for me to finish.
Alan B – you may consider yourself a novice, but coming close to finishing 8 times out of ten is solid performance in my book!
Too hard for me but I enjoyed the attempt and managed 11 correct answers, some in the right place in the grid! But I’d never heard of, eg “fen”, “gig mill” etc. And I don’t understand the definition of “leg”as “on” – is that cricket terminology? Was pleased to finish the much easier Chalicea one but it’s good that there ‘s a variety of levels of difficulty, makes life more interesting! So glad this blog exists to help untangle the mysteries after the event – thank you to the bloggers.
Amateur – yes, the leg side is the half of the field behind the batsman’s legs, also known as the “on” side. The other side of the field is the “off” side.
Thank you Pee Dee – that’s a “well, I’ll be darned!” light bulb moment for me – could be useful for a few crosswords! – much appreciated.
Amateur – the two words you mention were also new to me, as I imagine is often the case when setters are forced to use the more obscure dictionaries that come with grid-filling software. And I also imagine that the editor is delighted by what you have to say more generally, which captures the spirit of the IQ community perfectly. Happy solving.
Ifor
This was a fabulous puzzle – many thanks Ifor!
Ifor
You make a good point about the use of unfamiliar words in Inquisitor puzzles. I’m new to these puzzles too, but I absolutely expect to find unfamiliar words among the answers – most of them arising, I’ve no doubt, from the challenge of the grids. I make much use of Chambers when solving these puzzles – not a lot of use for proper names but indispensable nevertheless.