Enigmatic Variations No. 1016: Sentry Duties by Mynot

A short preamble instructs solvers to consider ‘SENTRY DUTIES’ in ‘thematically treating’ 12 answers before entry, to create new words. So far so good. But then we are told: ‘How the remaining answers must be entered could also be considered thematic.’ Doesn’t that mean that ALL answers are treated thematically?! I think I have solved/completed this, but I’m still not sure that all the remaining answers were ‘treated’…

Preamble grumbles aside, I found this a stiff challenge of an EV, requiring a lot of dipping in and out during the full 10 days or so available to complete and submit in time for the competition deadline. (Although those 10 days were interrupted by 4 days of golfing and drinking – or was that the other way around – in bonnie and sunny Scotland…)

There were no obvious mismatched clue/grid lengths, so I guessed that the ‘treatment’ was going to involve some sort of jumbling/reversing of answers, or maybe adjustment by clashing letters. For me this means use of a pencil, and an enlarged copy of the grid, entering across words in the top right corrner of their cells, downs in the bottom left, and highlighting any clashes. Because this means one can’t necessarily ‘trust’ crossing letters, it does make for some harder/purer solving… And lots of it – a lot packed in there, with the longest entries at 8 letters, lots of 4s, 5s, 6s. A nice mixture of some relatively quick gets (double defns like 36A RUE, homophones like 5D ROOD) and plenty of harder clues and interesting obscure/dialect words like 22D JOLL, 26D DRICKSIE, 21A AHINT. I particularly enjoyed 4A, with the image of the local WI greeting each other with an I-AND-I!

After a while – and much head scratching, erasing and re-work – it started to become clear that many of the answers had to be reversed on entry – and there were more than 12 like this, so this must be those ‘remaining answers’? But there seemed to be two other groups forming – some where they seemed to enter normally, and some where there seemed to be letter clashes not resolved by simple reversals.

In all this, I had lost focus on the puzzle title – or rather just hadn’t understood it/got the hint! The penny slowly dropped when I realised that all the clashes I could see were one letter apart – so the SENTRY DUTY for the 12 answers was a ‘shift’ one letter to the right (alphabetically): NEER became OFFS, ANTS became BOUT, etc. And those reversed entries were a ‘shift’ in direction? But there were still a number of normally entered answers…unless I have mssed a third interpretation of the theme?

All in all, a very enjoyable challenge from Mynot, proving that sometimes you can solve all the clues and fit them in without fully understanding the preamble and theme!