EV 1751 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1751 (Hints)
In The Dock by Karla
Hints and tips by Gabriel / Jpeg

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Karla has set a handful of EV puzzles before and this one promises to be challenging. What could the title refer to? The obvious answer that the LLMs seemed to gravitate to referred to the most famous of mutinies. Let’s see if that pans out.

Preamble: One unclued entry relates to a writer’s journey. Corrected misprints in definitions of 21 clues give a work and a hint to where single letter change is required after grid fill to reveal the writer’s title and a group who were IN THE DOCK after the journey. Initial letters of remaining clues give an epithet. All but two letters of an entry related to the writer’s companion on the journey should be changed to reveal one word of the group’s location leaving real words. Solvers should highlight 1) the writer’s title 2) the companion and 3) one word of the unclued entry plus the changed location entry (27 cells in total, in four straight lines). 

We have to keep track of two different letter groups. The first letters of unmodified clues might be easier to track later but if there is a question about if a clue’s definition has a misprint knowing almost-complete messages could be useful. Also, having misprints only in the definition helps.

Clues:
Across
1 Memo tenor’s leaving for rector in suit (5)
Wordplay involves a letter for letter replacement and don’t forget definitional misprints.

5 Ten celebrated on circuit (7)
Put the past tense of a verb after a noun for something a racer might complete to get this particular varietal noun.

12 Turnover of poor player visiting interior of Goan city (5)
Place a reversed short noun for a player (but not one of the sporting variety) inside two letters extracted from another word to get something that American footballer Peyton Manning was famed for saying.

38 Take dupe for one in river without Oscar (3)
“For one” is being used here as a synonym of “for example”.

40 Stalk relative on two-wheeler without Mo (8)
Some two-wheelers are motorised, also note how the little word “on” essentially performs a “post-fix concatenation operation” (to abuse a very techie term).

41 Rats perhaps taking out extremely old hares (5)
My LOI (last one in) so deserves a mention: rats and hares are, from the surface reading point of view, somewhat coherent but you need to mutilate something (and since we’re underlining the definition you know what). The wordplay removes the extremities of a 3-letter word from a seven letter synonym.

Down
3 Talk about vetting of ring (6)
Combine two synonyms: one either noun or verb and the other a preposition to get the definition. Rings don’t usually require vetting.

7 Lace together branches of tree spanning centre of gully (6)
Insert a single letter in a particular kind of fruit tree to get this verb.

20 Sailor’s ripe satsumas initially left around (5)
The definition is a noun for something a sailor would use. The wordplay combines a single letter with the reversal of a sailor’s own directional term.

23 Ribbon cut by male atop grey post? (8, two words)
The definition is an instance of the answer. Wordplay requires the usual pronoun and 2-letter abbreviation to be inserted into a 4-letter synonym.

33 Drinking nice Campari as replacement at last for spirit (5)
Not the same kind of spirit as Campari, but given by a collection of individual letters.

Definitions are underlined.

Initial letters of the remaining clues were quickly resolved to reveal the likely writer.  A quick wiki scan revealed the work – and the second part of the message tells us where to mutilate the grid for their title(s). Some more wiki reading was necessary in order to figure out the companion – but the relevant destination is named explicitly in the initially filled grid and the meaning of the unclued entry becomes clear so you should be able to find her name. In addition, the change made to the entry to produce the writer’s title indicates the category of our group which for me was the last piece of the puzzle

Those clues weren’t too bad but the LLMs were definitely looking in the wrong place. But once we had everything pretty much figured out my LLM was able to confirm what the extra letters were spelling out and gave us context on the reference. Don’t forget to change those letters and highlight everything requested – if you highlight your changed letters you are on the right track.

I found the endgame pretty hard: I had found all the relevant concepts in wikipedia but I struggled to map them to changes in the grid.

Difficulty: 3 / 5 (due to endgame the clues themselves were mostly accessible at 2 / 5).

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