Inquisitor 1881: Get the Message by Poat

14 comments on “Inquisitor 1881: Get the Message by Poat”

1. Duncan has my unqualified admiration for working this one out. I solved the crossword, and agree there were some enjoyable clues, and then…..Obviously, you can’t make any progress without working out the artist. I went wrong in two respects; first by reading the preamble literally and assuming that the “alluding to” phrase meant that the extra words would be synonyms for the hits, rather than words directly extracted from them, and second by assuming that the entry to be changed for the “maiden name” would be the unused married name of the artist (since otherwise how is one ever supposed to guess her?) Naturally, no joy from these lines of attack. However, seeing just how complicated the end game became, I think I’m on balance pleased to have got stuck when I did. The whole idea of the puzzle is very ingenious and superbly put together, but the phrase “life is too short” comes to mind. Many thanks to Duncan for the blog, which must have taken hours, and congratulations to anyone who solved it; if this is a typical sample of Poat’s puzzles, then I can see why it might take 3 years to compile one !

2. I’m sure you know really, but in 18d the p comes from rep, not from published.
   Excellent puzzle, excellent artist.

3. graham whittaker @ 2

   Thanks – I have updated the blog

4. I wasn’t getting much luck from chatgpt on the artist’s identity, but my 80s music-obsessed partner took no time at all… but even so, who knew we would end up with Mrs Houdini? I found the trail fascinating, and if I was slightly disappointed by the final task, it was because I failed to notice that it was the code for ‘key’. Thanks to Duncan for the heavy lifting and to Poat for a thorny challenge.

5. Filled the grid, got the musician and album, entered the correct maiden name, noted the use of ‘key’ in the preamble… but completely failed to identify what else needed to be highlighted. I didn’t study Mr & Mrs Houdini in sufficient depth to find the code information, so thank you for the explanation. I thought that the method of communication had to be the kiss and so spent a long time looking for associated words (lip, tongue, mouth etc) before giving up and awaiting the blog.

   I enjoyed the puzzle and the use of chart placings to indicate letters, but the endgame was a leap too far for me I’m afraid.

6. Certainly a tour de force from extra words to Kate Bush to Houdini’s wife and their secret code. I did manage to get to the end and thoroughly enjoyed it, but my head did hurt!

   A few small comments;
   – I loved the “chart position” mechanic, yet another new one when I thought we might finally run out of ideas on how to extract letters. However, this may be the first time where a puzzle simply cannot be completed without Google, as I doubt anyone would freely actually know an artist’s chart positions
   – Highlighting the code for KEY isn’t simply appropriate for a Houdini puzzle, it was specifically requested in the preamble: “…then highlight the key elements of the means of communication (five words)”. Though I missed the fact that there was a key in Kate Bush’s mouth!
   – Also loved learning about the Erfurt Latrine Disaster. Luckily no longer a leading cause of death.
   – duncanshiell, it seems overly petty to point it out after such an excellent blog, but only PRAY PRAY should be highlighted not PRAYS PRAYED. You also use HAHNER instead of RAHNER in the second blog entry (even more petty, but aren’t we all perfectionists here?)
   – Sagittarius @1 “life is too short” made me chuckle…if I took that to heart I wouldn’t bother doing Inquisitors in the first place 🙂

   Thanks to Duncan and Poat. Need a little sit-down now until the next one arrives.

7. arnold @ 6

   Thanks – blog updated

8. This was one of my favorite recent Inquisitors, starting off impenetrable then revealing itself layer by layer and meandering to a quite unexpected endgame… although I do understand the solvers who stopped short, there was rather a lot going on by the end. My way in was spotting a few key extra words (sky, heights, hounds) that rang a faint enough bell to suggest a Kate Bush theory that allowed me to ferret out a few more of the extra words, leading me to the album title and the eventual endgame. Penny drop after penny drop…

   I agree with arnold @6 on the chart position device – clever, but one definitely needed to look them up. I doubt even Ms Bush could have recited them all off the top of her head 🙂 Between that, the maiden name and the code, this was most definitely a Wiki-heavy solve.

   Thanks both for a satisfyingly complicated puzzle and a comprehensive blog!

9. Got most of the grid filled but none of the extra words I found rang any bells. A good one for Kate Bush fans, but without spending hours on Google I was never going to get to the end. Maybe if I’d identified the artist I’d have kept plugging away, but not being able to find Kate Bush made it impossible to run any further up this rather steep hill.

10. Much enjoyed when I eventually got there! All thanks to Poat and duncanshiell. I’m hopeless at pop music references, but when I read the list of extra words to my wife she instantly said “Kate Bush” and I started looking up chart positions in Wikipedia. What an unexpected segue from Bush to the Houdinis — but a welcome one because I did know a bit about their mentalist-act code, and remembering its use of PRAY helped locate the maiden-name substitution. Wow. A lot going on, indeed.

11. Erfurt Latrine Disaster – we looked at anagrams of FURTER and came up with ERFURT as a possibility. We had a laugh when we realised that it was the site of a latrine disaster – not that funny for the people involved though.

    As others have said, plenty of searching online but we did at least realise that it was Kate Bush we had to focus on. Whilst Joyce carried on with her searching, Bert discovered the link to Houdini with the album cover.

    We identified the words that we needed to highlight but completely missed KEY so it was really a DNF this time. So much going on!

    Thanks to both.

12. I really enjoyed this but I couldn’t quite make the preamble work. It seems to require that the album cover shows Mrs Houdini using the code – the means of communication whose “key” elements we highlight. But it doesn’t – it shows her passing the key to her husband. I arrived at the code eventually but for some time I thought “communication” was being used in an old-fashioned sense and the means was the kiss (communicating – passing – the key to HH). So I confidently started looking for the “key” members of Kiss (the band) hidden in the grid… I can’t help thinking something was lost in an edit here and the original preamble was more along the lines “…shows a historical character who attempted to communicate…”

13. Late to the party …

    I was fortunate enough to have a notion it was Kate Bush after getting only two of the extra words – hounds & child – but have much sympathy for those who failed to get over this hurdle unaided. Maybe this was a flaw in the puzzle, whose twists and turns I managed to navigate successfully to the end. Though it did take quite a while!

    Thanks to all. Oh, and I too overlooked the significance of the key in Kate Bush’s mouth – no matter.

    PS Thrown (just a bit) by the fact that Running up that Hill reached #3 on its original release; it was only the re-release many years later that got to #1. But THE DREAMING made much more sense than THD DREAMING.

14. I think “leerie” is Scots for “lamplighter”. One of the few clues I got.

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