EV1654
Verse’s Opening by Ifor
Setter’s Blog
Unclued entries are given by first letters of preamble sentences plus the title. Highlighting shows the opening line of the Gospel of John.
Setter’s blog
Any quotation about “words” always looks promising, so it was especially pleasing to note that “in the beginning…” not only had an obvious way forward but was of 24 letters, allowing symmetrical grid placement. I started by confirming that as positioned there was still plenty of flexibility to include the thematic “clues” (and noted that, to get the phrase in, bar symmetry had already to be abandoned, so I could ignore that as a consideration from then on). I then turned my attention to standard preamble phrases such as “clues are in normal order”, picking out relevant Chambers words and trying to build plausible sentences around the remainder. Comments received suggest that many solvers didn’t spot what was going on until the highlighting appeared, which was obviously my aim. The use of the title to give VOL (a real word, not just an abbreviation) with the unchecked V was to ensure that solvers had to understand the concept rather than simply fill the vacant cells by pattern-matching. Having constructed a preamble, it was then time to shoehorn the relevant words into the grid, which proved surprisingly easy; in fact there’s another, now normally-clued, entry that was originally “initialled” but which the editor rightly felt stood out as unusual and so was discarded. It also allowed the original “some” in Samaritans to become the fairer “seven”. My thanks to him for that intervention, his usual accurate pointing-out of clue infelicities and for accepting a puzzle which perforce needed the normal title-in-preamble and Chambers references to be omitted.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.