EV 1724 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1724 (Hints)

First or Second by Vismut

Hints and tips by Phibs

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Following his notable success with Operation Market Garden, I asked Claude, “In a themed crossword, we have to identify some words from an epitaph, unscramble a description of five events, find all but one of the contestants who came first or second in these events, and then establish the final resting place of the remaining contestant. Do you have any ideas?”

I suspect there was just too much data there for Claude to digest. In between a rephrasing of the information I’d supplied and a request for me to tell him what I’d got so far, he offered these crumbs of guidance:

“Some ideas to help you solve it:

The epitaph probably contains scrambled letters or hidden words that spell out the events
The events might be competitions, races, or contests of some kind
The contestants’ names might be wordplay or anagrams themselves
The “final resting place” is almost certainly the location mentioned in the original epitaph, creating a circular solution”

Claude, ignored.

Preamble: The FIRST clues are given in alphabetical order of their answers, all of which are either three or four letters long. Each of these clues contains a word from an epitaph, to be removed before solving; taking the FIRST letter appearing after the extra word in each case gives a jumble of a description of five events. Four contestants coming FIRST OR SECOND in these events complete the unclued entries. The SECOND clues are given in alphabetical order of their answers. SECOND letters of these clues, when read in the correct clue order, give an instruction to reveal the remaining contestant; a thematically shaped line must be drawn through his final resting place (11 cells). Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

So we have two sets of clues, the clues in each group being listed in alphabetical order of their answers, and all those in the First set containing an extra word. We can see from an inspection of the grid that there are no unclued 3 or 4 letter entries, and a quick count of the ‘Second’ clues tells us that there are four unclued entries in total, one being of 13 letters. Which group of clues shall we start with? If we solve all the ‘First’ clues, we can at best enter the two trios of interlinking four-letter answers (NNE and SSW of the grid), but we will also have all the words taken from the epitaph. Even a few of these will probably be enough – perhaps with the aid of a web search – to reveal the theme; in addition, we will have the 14 initial letters to be rearranged into a description of the events, which will also potentially take us straight to the theme, but this will probably mean solving all 14 clues. If we kick off with the ‘Second’ clues, we will gather the material to start filling the grid in earnest, but until we have entered most of the answers we won’t have any idea what the message is (because it comes from the ‘Second’ clues in normal clue order, ie across entries top to bottom, then down entries top to bottom), and it may not be much help in isolation anyway. I’m going to tackle the Firsts first and the Seconds second, keep track of the words removed from the Firsts as well as those initial letters immediately following the stowaways, and not worry about the theme till I’ve got most of the clued answers into the grid.

With the Firsts, the stowaway word must be removed prior to solving, meaning that the clue cannot be satisfactorily solved while it remains. So if one of the First clues were “This setter spends six hours in mildly obscene conversation”, the wordplay has VISMUT losing VI, the answer is SMUT, and the extra word is ‘hours’, since it actively interferes with the wordplay. The word ‘in’ is also superfluous, but it serves as a link from wordplay to definition and is therefore a legitimate part of the clue. The letter contributing to the jumble would be I, the first letter of ‘in’.

General notes on alphabetical jigsaws: Having the clues presented in alphabetical order of answers is always a help – not only does it mean that the early answers will begin with early letters of the alphabet and so on, but also that if, say, the answer to the seventh clue is CAKES and the ninth is CRUMBS, the eighth answer lies alphabetically within the small range between them. Remember also that if you are planning to enter an answer which intersects with the start of another entry – let’s say the answer is POSSIBLE and the seventh letter is also the first letter of a five-letter light – there will need to be a five-letter solution beginning with ‘L’; if you’ve already solved clues that yield KINGDOM and MUSIC and the only intervening clue is for a six-letter answer, then POSSIBLE it is not. Make sure to write all the answers against the clues, even if you can put them straight into the grid, because they may help you with a nearby clue.

First

–  Giant rest, nothing active
The giant is one of a pair that you might associate with Armageddon, the Lord Mayor’s Show, or the Cambridgeshire landscape.

–  Substantive fly disregarding duck and blue tit
The ‘substantive’ here refers to a particular four-letter part of speech, while the answer is the name given to the blue tit on account of its, well, habit.

Second

–  Flat band that’s written on learning new snatch in retrospective (8)
‘Learning’ (four letters), ‘new’ (one letter), and ‘snatch’ or ‘arrest’ (three letters) are collectively seen ‘in retrospective’.

–  Esther’s outside, below room hosting game getting nastier (8)
The room is the sort that might contain a monk, and the game is the 15-player code.

–  Put up rubbish space for cap holder (13, two words)
Words of five, four, and four letters contribute to the (5,8) answer, with ‘put up’ relating specifically to sending out a team for a sporting event.

–  Initially laboratory yields measure of progress for vaccine (5)
‘Initially’ is one of those letter selection indicators which can apply to multiple words, and here it acts on two. The ‘measure of progress’ is actually a measure of the rate of progress, often of a motor vehicle.

–  Accommodating Henry, remarking on trifle (7)
The key element of the wordplay here is a six-letter word meaning ‘remarking on’ or ‘jotting down’.

–  Good drops out of most valuable uncorked wine rarely aged (7)
Again, a six-letter word meaning ‘most valuable’ is at the heart of the wordplay, although ‘shining’ or ‘glorious’ might be more familiar senses. The ‘uncorked’ is something of a mystery – if it has a valid cryptic meaning, which I would question, it should surely indicate removal of a ‘stopper’ (the middle bit) or the ‘bark’ (the outside letters), but here it appears to indicate the removal of the first letter from a three-letter word frequently answering in crosswords to ‘wine’ – Chambers offers no support for this interpretation.

–  Fish young yen for porridge in Ayr (8)
A charade of two four-letter words, the first being a young fish of a type that Henry VIII married and the second the sort of yen that he might have experienced a few years into their union, had he (or it) lasted until 1550.

–  Indian shrew disheartened wholesome priest (7)
The five-letter word for ‘wholesome’ which must be ‘disheartened’ could also be indicated by ‘in good condition’ or ‘well-founded’; the three-letter priest is a regular visitor to crosswords.

–  Relatives of onions topped and chopped up in salad (9)
Five letters must be rearranged (‘chopped up’) inside a word for a brassica-based salad. Don’t forget that in barred puzzles hyphenated answers are enumerated as single words, so TUG-OF-WAR would be shown as ‘(8)’.

–  Scruffy lair behind trimmed down plant (7)
The three letters preceding an anagram are produced from a four-letter word for a type of fine soft animal hair, from which the last letter has been ‘trimmed’.

Definitions in clues are underlined

If the theme’s milieu was familiar to you, as it was to me, then you may find that one of the unclued entries jumps out at you, perhaps a nine-letter one with only two unchecked letters. If not, googling a few of the words extracted from the First clues (which are in the same order as they occur in the epitaph) or rearranging the 14 initial letters will set you on the right track. The web will help you to fill in any blanks in the unclued entries (two of them comprise two words), and once you’ve assembled the instruction from the Second clues (I hate that process – I invariably overlook one of the down entries and end up with a strange message) you will surely be able to take the appropriate action. If you’re not an aficionado, and you weren’t at this year’s Listener dinner, then the web will again prove your salvation when it comes to the last hurdle, the drawing of a thematically shaped line (photographs available online confirm the shape).

There was a lot going on in this puzzle, and for a jigsaw some of the clues were quite tricky; thankfully there were no traps for the unwary when it came to the grid fill – if an answer fitted with at least two checkers, it was the right entry. The stages of the endgame were clear and unambiguous.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾🥾 (A challenge that is not suitable for novices – or the under-sevens)

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