Enigmatic Variations No. 911 MMO by Glow-worm

A murder mystery this week – sounds a good one. The preamble promises a hunt for not only the murder victim, but also the location of the victim and the investigator of the case. Once these have been determined it’s on to isolate the perpetrator from 5 (to be identified) suspects, with their murderous means and motive.  Is the puzzle number significant – This could be very interesting?

So, on to the rules for the puzzle’s clues, some clues are missing a letter in the cryptic indication, some clues, corresponding to the suspects, have no definition (other than being the suspects of course) and possess superfluous letters (‘d’,’n’,’a’) in their cryptic indication, whilst the remaining clues are normal.

Some relatively straight-forward clues to get one’s teeth into this week, indeed not too many that needed confirmation from Chambers – the majority of the clues proved to be quite normal. As a result, the grid-fill was quite rapid and it quickly became obvious that the five suspects were all 6 letters long and were at 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 down.  So it was VERNON, WALTER, XAVIER, YVETTE or ZINNIA with only ZINNIA having the superfluous letters removed, definitively, in the order DNA – A clue perhaps, confirmation by DNA?

Now for the unclued entries – 10dn, is the investigator, this became quite obvious with the last 5 checked letters being MOR_E, so inspector MORSE – not quite – a quick rack of the memory banks for his first name and ENDEAVOUR MORSE was the entry. 47ac was the next to fall into place, the location C_S_LE – CASTLE and finally BERKELEY for 46ac. Berkeley castle is in Gloucestershire. So much about my hunch that the puzzle number was going to play a role – not a tower or two to be seen!

Then to link the missing letters diagonally so that every third letter was R, I, R, E and E (in Berkeley itself). This proved my hypothesis that it was ZINNIA and the method was the poison ATROPINE and the reason REVENGE from the A in ZINNIA to the second E in BERKELEY.

All in all, I enjoyed this and perhaps it is too soon for a 9/11 theme, but such a theme could open up a lot of interesting enigmatic variations.

A couple of minor misprints in the clues, I believe (40ac and 17 down, see below), but all in all very enjoyable – my gratitude to Glow-worm.

Key; dd = double definition, Rev = reversed, * anagram, underline = definition

Across

 Down