13 comments on “Inquisitor 1589: Pitch Black Desert Area by Wiglaf”

1. It’s always good to see a Theme and Variations puzzle. This type of thing used to be quite common among barred puzzles, but alas these days it seems to be as rare as the hairy-nosed wombat. There was a very nice PDM as all the threads of the theme came together, and while the not the most difficult of IQ puzzles, it was certainly very enjoyable. I didn’t know all the Berlin songs but they were easy to confirm without spending hours searching on the Net.

   Interesting blog comment about the title. Ideally a puzzle title should provide extra confirmation of any theme that the solver has to deduce, and do so relatively quickly; it’s never satisfactory when it takes longer to decipher the title than it does to fulfil all the requirements of the puzzle. It must be difficult for setters to get the right balance between a title that gives the theme away at the start (e.g. in this case “Film director called Steven”) and one that is so obscure it’s no help at all (e.g. “Seats?” – T in the SEVEN seas = Steven etc.). Here I thought Wiglaf got the balance just right.

2. I found this quite challenging. Even when I had the grid complete there were seven clues that I had solved but not fully understood, and I was still looking for three redundant words in order to complete the 6-letter name.

   After another run through the clues I managed to resolve all these little difficulties and got the name Berlin – a neat link between those two thematic sets.

   I was pleased to see the reference in the preamble to Collins for three of the entries, but I would have liked to see 2d [ADDY] mentioned there too. (As you say, kenmac, it is in Collins but not in Chambers. 33d [SPOOM] with that meaning was another one I couldn’t find.) And I too couldn’t understand how the clue to YEARNERS was supposed to work.

   The part of the puzzle that I enjoyed the most was finding the thematic items one by one and finding or working out the connections. The only one of the four themes I didn’t know (ALWAYS …) was easy enough to look up.

   It’s been a long time since I last tried a Theme and Variations puzzle, and I liked the way this one was put together.

   Regarding the name at the bottom, I’m not a fan of these compulsory extra bits tacked on to the endgames of Inquisitor puzzles from time to time. They are treats or impositions depending on your point of view and on whether the answer can be found. I happened to find the thematic name this time and match it to the cryptic clue, but I am not always so lucky.

   Thanks to Wiglaf and kenmac.

3. Enjoyed, with thanks to Wiglaf and kenmac.

   I wondered whether the title game involved a deliberate red herring. With only a few clues done I parsed it as GREEN (from “pitch” as playing field) + B + ERG, which with the three mentions of “variation(s) in the preamble stirred a vague memory. “Isn’t there something called Greenberg Variations?” I asked my wife, and she said Yes. Of course it led nowhere.

4. Good puzzle I thought, and not overly difficult as far as the IQ goes. I got the director’s name once LINCOLN and MUNICH fell so had little difficulty interpreting the title. Liked the way that MANDY required confirmation via BERLIN. Had fun looking for all the variants. Result, one satisfied, slightly hungover customer. 🙂

5. Having got Berlin, I could see the link to the songs and the German cities. I also spotted a link from Berlin (Game) to (Spy) Hook, Line, and Sinker, all being Len Deighton books. But I couldn’t manage a link from Berlin to US Presidents. Ronald Reagan and the Berlin Wall? JFK and “Ich bin ein Berliner”?

6. An enjoyable puzzle. The fact that there were a lot of unclued entries perhaps ensured that on the whole the clues were relatively straightforward. I guessed the Spielberg part of it quite early, thanks to Hook and Lincoln; but never did work out what “always remember mandy’ might mean (I failed to find Berlin because I know of Arne as a composer but not as a theatre composer. So there was a ‘t’ I didn’t need – and failure to ‘get’ 10D meant I never used its ‘l’.

   Many thanks to Wiglaf and kenmac.

7. I’m pleased to see the explanation of the clue to YEARNERS. I knew of Thomas Arne only as the composer of ‘Rule, Britannia’, and, paradoxically perhaps, I would have had a better chance of parsing that clue properly if the word ‘Theatre’ was not there.

8. Once I worked out the the theme was Spielberg films I was flummoxed when then asked to find a “name related to the theme”. Assuming Spielberg WAS the theme I thought we were looking for a name related to Spielberg! For that reason I thought the end bit a tad irritating but the puzzle overall was a good challenge

9. Bingy @8
   My experience might have been similar.  I didn’t know the Spielberg connection and had to find it, but when I did so I came across a James Mairata, who wrote about him.  In that name I saw RAT A (= desert area) before I saw B ERG (= black desert area) in Spielberg.  In front of RATA you have JAMES + a reversal of I AM.  There happens to be a singer-musician named James Black Pitch, who is completely irrelevant to this puzzle, but his name is James + a reversal of the words Pitch Black.  I felt I had to take that its logical end before eliminating it.  As a red herring it might even match David’s (@3).

10. Alan B – I found precisely the same person!

11. As with others, it was working out Spielberg at the end that proved the biggest hurdle, though I did have to resort to Google to work out the various themes. I suspect I wasn’t the only one to do so as, having Lincoln and guessing at Reagan, I typed these into Google and whatever clever, creepy algorithm is in charge of these things suggested Lincoln Reagan Taft, which I’m guessing means this was a common set of search words at the time (I’m not aware of any other particular connection that would group these three together, apart form assassination attempts).

    I did enjoy this, but I thought there were some tenuous connections between the different elements and I was delayed by a couple of spurious redundant words (‘they’ in 45a and ‘Theatre’ in 25D) and a fruitless search in Chambers for Addy.

12. No trouble with this, tho’ the lack of a reference for ADDY was irksome. I too initially thought that “theatre” was redundant (but at least Wikipedia has “Arne was a leading British theatre composer of the 18th century”). I took the theme to be ‘films directed by Spielberg’ rather than the man himself, so I looked no further for “a name related to the theme”.

    Thanks for the blog Ken, and to Wiglaf for a welcome theme-&-variations puzzle.

13. Super puzzle that I found quite tricky, probably because I couldn’t make any headway with the theme words until right at the end.  Once I twigged the Spielberg connection everything fell into place rapidly.  One or two clues I couldn’t parse, especially YEARNERS which I had no clue about at all.

    Thanks Wiglaf and kenmac for great puzzle and bog.

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