Inquisitor 1946: Refrain for a Stretch by Bungo

This seems to be Bungo’s first Inquisitor – he has set several Listener puzzles.

The preamble: Clues are in alphabetical order of their solutions. The answers to six normal clues must undergo a thematic adjustment before entry in the grid; enumerations refer to answer lengths. Remaining clues each contain a misprint of one letter in the definition; with the clues in conventional grid order the correct letters give the theme and a hint to the thematic adjustment required. In the completed grid, solvers must reveal a character’s true identity, thereby completing the character’s mission, which solvers must highlight (two words, sixteen cells in total). At all points the completed grid contains only real words, names and places.

This is clearly going to be a daunting puzzle – no clue numbers, six answers to be adjusted before entry and enumerations not necessarily relating to the available cells in the grid! On top of that, we have to get the answers into the grid before we could sort out the theme from the corrected misprints and the hint as to how the six answers have to be adjusted – but we would have to have already adjusted them in order to fill the grid!

The only option is to set out to solve some clues and try to figure out how they might interconnect in the grid. We counted the number of answers of each word length, and counted the spaces available in the grid for each word length – the numbers weren’t the same – eg there are 14 places in the grid for 4-letter words, but only 12 clues to 4-letter words. It became apparent that the ‘adjustments’ to the six ‘normal’ clues involve omitting letters to the answers before entry.

We found a few clues surprisingly easy, but we really struggled with the majority and had various unsuccessful attempts to fit them into the grid. In the end we ‘cold’ solved 41 of the 49 clues without finding places for them in the grid.

The key to determining the ultimate grid-fill was solving the three 9-letter clues, with only 2 locations in the grid – however, we had difficulty solving one of the three clues, and one of the two we had solved was a ‘normal’ clue which needed ‘adjustment’. For the purposes of the blog we have included clue numbers in the completed grid (but not in the list of clues – presented in alphabetical order of their answers, as set out by Bungo.)

We tried putting the one 9-letter answer we had solved that does not need ‘adjustment’ (SNUBNOSED) in either of the 9-letter grid positions and then tried to see how any of the crossing entries might fit in. Unfortunately, we tried to put it in 9d first and although we managed to fit some of the other answers in, it became clear that this was the wrong location, so started again with SNUBNOSED in 20d. This turned out to be the right place, and we managed to fit a lot of the answers we had already solved into the left side of the grid, but had some difficulty connecting across to the right side.

Meantime, we began to sort out the ‘adjustment’ needed to the answers to the ‘normal’ clues – all of which we had solved. As we had solved TILLAGE and FUSELAGE early on, we had wondered whether we might need to take AGE away, but that would not have left real words in both cases. Looking at the other ‘normal’ answers we noticed that we could take POW out of AIRPOWER and OUTPOWERS, LAG out of TILLAGE and FUSELAGE, and CON out of DEACONRY and MUSCONE  to leave real words, which we also managed to fit into the grid. So we have three abbreviations for prisoners ‘escaping’.

As we filled the grid, we also started to work out the theme from the misprints and, once we had completed the grid, in normal clue order these read:

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S ONLY OPERA – FREE THE PRISONER.

We are not great classical music or opera fans, so we had to check the theme opera – FIDELIO.  Apparently Fidelio is the assumed name of the wife of a man called Florestan who has been unjustly imprisoned. She disguises herself as a man to get into the prison and frees him.

‘FREE THE PRISONER’ clearly refers to removing POW, LAG and CON from the answers to ‘normal’ clues, as we had already worked out.

FIDELIO and FLORESTAN appear in the completed grid and comprise 16 cells, as mentioned in the preamble:

:

The preamble then asks us to ‘reveal a character’s true identity, thereby completing the character’s mission’. Fidelio’s real name is apparently LEONORE. We therefore have to replace FIDELIO with LEONORE to reveal her true identity, as below:

We can now ‘complete the character’s mission’:

We wondered why the title of the puzzle is ‘Refrain for a Stretch’. We suspect that this probably refers to the ‘Prisoners’ Chorus’ – apparently one of the highlights of the opera, but there doesn’t seem to be any reference to this in the grid.

All in all, we were rather disappointed by this IQ. Several clues were very contrived with dubious surfaces and inclusion of unusual words, and unless we have missed something, the endgame felt somewhat unsatisfactory. Sorry Bungo!