EV1617
Mistaken Identity by Ifor
Setter’s Blog
NOT ANGLES BUT ANGELS
Ten answers have LE entered as EL, as in the quote; three angels in the book of ENOCH (anagrammed in removed letter strings) replace OBTUSE, ACUTE, REFLEX.
Many of my puzzles require the solver to replace answers with new words generated by a modifying algorithm, and the thematic phrase looked a possible candidate, to be confirmed when investigation revealed that there were about 100 EL / LE pairs. I pruned this list, removing those where the meaning was similar or identical; in the end only one such pair appears (teazel / teazle) which of course required wordplay that distinguished between them. The angels proved to be more of a problem, with very few having the five-letter name needed to replace ACUTE, and these few being very much of the non-league rather than Premiership variety. In the end I thought the fairest way was to pick members of the same team and somehow point to Enoch as the common factor. Of course this could have been done via a message from remaining clues, but the letters looked user-friendly as deletable insertions. Thus the three “angle” clues were written first, and then a grid built around their symmetrical placings. All that then remained was to write the normal clues and go through the usual testing / submission / refining process. I hope it proved an interesting challenge.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.