Inquisitor

Not so hard this week, but enjoyable for all that. And a deft handling of the thematic elements, so thanks to Charybdis for this puzzle.   The entry at 25a & a jumbling … Read more >>

Wow, what a long, convoluted preamble: This puzzle features eight pairs. Six thematic entries are anagrams of a pair member; six others are possible associations of the other member. Clues to these comprise … Read more >>

Baffling rubric until the penny eventually dropped after four days of cogitation. This difficult crossword concerned a “meeting” between A Crosse and D Owen. The difficulty arose from a number of sources. There … Read more >>

This puzzle had a fairly long preamble: "In every clue but one, a letter must be removed from the definition part before solving.  In clue order, these spell out the beginning of a … Read more >>

Quite a lot going here, and a grade 4 workout. Five works by x to be discovered …   Original letters in down misprinted definitions {novel} spell out the first. Replacing x‘s initials … Read more >>

The rubric reads: In several cases the answers to across and down clues clash as to the presence or absence of a letter – lengths in brackets refer to the number of spaces … Read more >>

A relatively straightforward offering by Samuel, whose last puzzle in this series was on Christmas Eve 2011. Five characters filled five of the eight unclued entries. The sixth character was to have a … Read more >>

This puzzle had quite a long preamble, as follows: ‘Initially the filled grid will contain seven consecutive empty cells.  One letter must be removed from the answers to 20 clues and the residue … Read more >>

Augeas’s second Inquisitor puzzle, so an appropriate title? And forgive me if I’m brief – on a week’s break for Easter, just outside Hay-on-Wye.   Four items have something in common, three of … Read more >>

There’s a misprint in the definition in all clues. In clue order, they spell out a two part instruction, which will help us to identify a “running joke.” Once the grid’s complete, we have to transform … Read more >>

Reasonable start this week, but a tricky finish. We were asked to identify a “joiner” from “components” deduced from the unclued entries, and from misprinted letters in 15 clues. There were also blank … Read more >>

The preamble for this puzzle appeared mind-bogglingly complex on first read through.  It went as follows: What started off as x (between a, b and cde) may have been compromised by a direction … Read more >>

Answers to 16 clues have one letter removed (wherever it occurs) before entry; wordplay refers to the entry. The three unclued entries are of a kind with what these missing letters suggest. Ten … Read more >>

The preamble tells us that there are misprints in the definitions in some clues but doesn’t tell us how many. The corrected letters give a cryptic link to a location. Once the grid’s … Read more >>

This gave us a good workout and a dialogue between Ba and me (Hi) eventually sorted everything out with one minor exception in 20A. We had three parts to consider according to the rubric. 1) … Read more >>