Inquisitor 1653: Lemon Time by Triton

25 comments on “Inquisitor 1653: Lemon Time by Triton”

1. 

   Jon_S

   #1 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 10:36

   
   

   I spent most of my solving time trying to justify SOBA, and only did so on the basis of the thematic stuff having failed miserably to parse it, based on it being a likely Japanese food and the first part of VERY WICKED. To further compound my problems I couldn’t for the life of me find the CHAPS bit, and only finished based on a hunch that I’d be looking for a ransom DEMAND. Not my finest hour. My Inquisitor solves at the moment seem to be 10% grid fill and 90% staring at the grid trying to work out what to do about the end game!

2. 

   kenmac

   #2 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 12:08

   
   

   I never noticed the SO BAD, etc. so when I did solve it , through trial-and-error, I was left a little deflated.

   Having noticed the reappearance of ANDY LEMON, I went to the previous puzzle (Inqusitor 1579) to see if anything jumped out. Boy, the bloke who blogged that was a bit grumpy, wasn’t he?

   In the end, it was fairly satisfying but more so for seeing the SO BAD stuff.

   Thanks to Triton and Duncanshiell.

3. 

   Howard L

   #3 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 13:05

   
   

   I completed the grid with no more than the usual difficulty (which is to say quite a bit) and saw SO BAD E as a likely place to look for the hostage. However, after quite a bit of grid staring I dismissed it as just a coincidence as I couldn’t see any way of fitting ANDY LEMON into the surrounding cells. After two days more of grid staring I realised that there was nowhere in the grid which could accommodate ANDY LEMON and it was only then that I could make the leap of imagination to look for placing just ANDY into the grid. Identification of the correct location soon followed. There was a hint in the preamble that only ANDY need be placed in the grid, but I still feel a bit aggrieved by the misdirection.

   Thanks anyway to Triton and to Duncan for the blog

4. 

   cruciverbophile

   #4 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 13:05

   
   

   I enjoyed Andy’s reappearance, despite taking an inordinate amount of time to find him (and the enclosing SO BAD E MEN). I did feel that there was a disproportionately high number of clues which required us to take fragments off longer words to get the answer. I’ve no problem with this type of clue device but I believe that it’s better if used sparingly.

5. 

   Neil Hunter

   #5 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 13:59

   
   

   I agree with cruciverbophile@4; this had a higher than normal number of solutions that I could not parse, almost all of the type he describes (flagon, futile, ironside, caterpillar). Another answer I failed to pass at 38a was ‘soya’. Yes, OK, it was also wrong, but it was only one mystery among several. Naturally that crippled my search for wickedness in the grid; but I seem to be more of a ready quitter than Jon_S@1 or Howard L@3, so didn’t expend too much time on it.

   Thanks to Duncanshiell and Triton.

6. 

   Phil K

   #6 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 15:52

   
   

   A pleasant fill. Wasted some time trying to convince myself that the good folk of Soham could be referred to as Soyans before checking the dictionary entry for snob. Then wasted a lot more time trying to find the yakuza who had imprisoned Mr Lemon but to no avail…such criminal organisations are notoriously discreet. The revelation that I was just looking for some BAD E MEN was a little deflating.

   Thanks to setter and blogger.

7. 

   Alan B

   #7 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 17:41

   
   

   This is my third Triton, and after doing rather badly in my first two encounters I was keen to do better with this one. In the event, I managed to fill the grid with a final tally of only two guesses (unparsed solutions) – a good performance for a Triton puzzle.  I enjoyed most of the clues, some of which I found tough.

   I identified the seven items, leading me to Japan, and formed a complete message from letters collected from the across clues.  But I needed to read the setter’s mind to know what to do next, and I was unable to carry out the remaining instructions.

   I liked the way that letters were picked from the clues after solving – a device that I haven’t come across before. In some cases the letter could be picked before solving the clue, thereby helping with the solution.

   Thanks to Triton for a challenging puzzle, only the last part of which was unresolvable. And thanks to Duncan for the blog.

   Like cruciverbophile, I noted that Triton likes using subtractions of more than one letter in wordplay.  There were 9 such instances, the two biggest being PILLAR (to make CATER) and ELOPE (to make PEN).  I remember this characteristic from the previous Andy Lemon puzzle.  I welcome this kind of device in moderation, as it tends to make a tricky clue a tad trickier.

8. 

   Quixote

   #8 - Tue 7th Jul 20, 18:47

   
   

   I missed te first Andy Lemon puzzle, but knew the anagram of my name because some bright spark sugeested it years ago ( who was i? was it our setter?). I didn’t care for the idea of being kidnapped but I did enjoy the puzzle

9. 

   copmus

   #9 - Wed 8th Jul 20, 07:28

   
   

   Well I thought Andy (or Don) wouldnt have minded a bit of FETA but I dont suppose it was available in the circs

   I seem to remember filling the grid  but thats the easy bit   so thanks for great blog and thanks  Don for popping in

10. 

    Bingybing

    #10 - Wed 8th Jul 20, 07:57

    
    

    @Howard L – I’m entirely with you. The preamble naturally leads one to assume ‘ANDY LEMON’ had to be placed in the grid and for that reason I needed a nudge from a fellow solver to confirm otherwise. The ‘LEMON’ bit is utterly irrelevant to the puzzle so ‘aggrieved’ pretty much sums up how I felt too.

11. 

    NNI

    #11 - Wed 8th Jul 20, 08:36

    
    

    Having completed the grid, I had difficulty trying to place ANDY LEMON in the grid. So I concentrated only on the letter Y, and went slowly through the grid until I realised PEN could become YEN and DEMOTE would become DEMAND. Job done. It was only later on that I went back to the grid and spotted SO BAD E MEN. It was like failing to spot an obvious theme which everyone else could clearly see.

12. 

    NormanJL

    #12 - Wed 8th Jul 20, 22:25

    
    

    I needed a hefty nudge from a couple of kind souls to reveal the endgame, and even then I couldn’t understand it until it was re-explained slowly using short words. I too was very disappointed that there were no Yakuza holding him captive, and that Lemon had absolutely nothing to do with the puzzle. So bad E men, eh. Harrumph.

13. 

    Triton

    #13 - Thu 9th Jul 20, 11:49

    
    

    Thanks to Duncan for the non-grumpy 🙂 blog, to Jon likewise, and to all who have taken the time to comment.

    In my puzzles I try to keep the unch count low, to include as few obscure solutions as possible, and to avoid gimmicks that distort the clues. Because of this, I feel that it’s appropriate to compensate to some extent by making my clues reasonably tough, hence the repeated use of the ‘take one indicated word from another’ device. I particularly wanted to ensure that the wordplays for the undefined entries were sufficiently tricky that the Japanese ‘game’ would not be given away from the outset; however, in the light of solvers’ comments I realize that I should have made the clue for SOBA a little easier, given the potential ambiguity with SOYA and the importance of the correct entry in the endgame. Apologies to those who struggled with that one.

    I remain largely unrepentant regarding the accommodation of Andy. I did consider saying that the message gave “a cryptic description of the characters holding Andy”, but I felt that since Andy is a cryptic crossword setter it would be reasonable to assume that “Andy’s description of those holding him” would itself be mildly cryptic. It was my intention that interpreting the message would be a key stage in the solving process, and that solvers who located the SO BAD E MEN in the grid would discover them ‘holding’ exactly four cells, into which ANDY would fit snugly. I’m sorry that some of you felt aggrieved, and perhaps the alternative preamble wording would have helped, but I do feel that the puzzle was still solvable through the ‘front door’.

    And I promise that I will try to ensure that Andy is not kidnapped again. Ever.

14. 

    HolyGhost

    #14 - Thu 9th Jul 20, 16:08

    
    

    I’m another who thought the use of  ‘take one indicated word from another’ was excessive; and I don’t count cases where the removal is a standard and commonly used abbreviation such as N(ame), S(pecial), FL(uid), ST(rait). Nevertheless, thanks for the puzzle, Triton.

    I did look for PASCHE – anagram (“so bad”) of E(astern) CHAPS but that made no sense – and while scanning the grid I found the ANDY replacement revealing DEMAND YEN, so I never noticed the SO BAD E MEN holding him. This is the second time of late that I’ve missed some aspect of the endgame that wasn’t required for a correct  solution. (The other was MARS–MORETON–H). I must be losing my touch.
    And thanks to Duncan for explaining the wordplay for two answers that I didn’t figure out (AIOLI & ONSIDE).

15. 

    Triton

    #15 - Thu 9th Jul 20, 16:55

    
    

    …I think that’s fair comment. A tricky wordplay-only clue for a 4/5 letter word is almost inevitably going to involve some sort of subtraction, but on reflection that was probably a good reason to be more sparing with the use of the device elsewhere.

16. 

    Alan B

    #16 - Thu 9th Jul 20, 21:50

    
    

    I appreciated Triton’s comments, and I’d like to add one further thing to what I reported above, prompted by something he wrote about how and where the theme was to be discovered.

    As I indicated in my first comment I was unable to get a whiff of the theme.  Having now seen the explanations, I can safely say that I would never have discovered it.  (The same was true of Andy’s first adventure.)  For me and some other solvers there was not enough to go on.  My only possible route would have been to indulge in grid-gazing for an indefinite amount of time, keeping the cryptic hint in mind, while keeping in the back of my mind the possibitilty that one needed to spot a further hint first.

    Naturally, I read the message as a cryptic clue, but I expected to get a proper answer to that (meaning a well-formed word or phrase) and not a phrase like SO BAD E MEN, which I would not have thought of and, incidentally, was not in plain sight in the grid.  (I made ‘very wicked Eastern chaps’ into V-ILL-AINU easily enough, but that did not quite make VILLAINS.)  I find grid-gazing physically tiring anyway.  With these puzzles, I almost always take on a grid search only if I know at least the kind of thing I am looking for (a villain, for example!) – not necessarily the exact thing.

    I’ll now just echo a point I made in my own non-grumpy comment above: I appreciated this puzzle mainly because I enjoyed nearly all of the clues.  I also liked the thematic design, with particular reference to the device for extracting single letters from the Across clues.  With the majority of these puzzles the rewarding part is the completion of the crossword – the theme is a bonus, and I sometimes don’t get it.

17. 

    Triton

    #17 - Fri 10th Jul 20, 10:31

    
    

    Alan B – thank you for your positive comments both @7 and @16, which are much appreciated, and for your additional notes regarding the denouement. I think it’s time to admit that I am a notoriously bad judge of the difficulty of my own puzzles, in particular the endgames. With this and your observations in mind, further reflection leads me to believe that expecting solvers to find an interrupted sequence of individually-implied words, none of which was more than three letters long, was asking for too much of a leap. I am therefore considerably more repentant than I was yesterday 🙂

    I’m no fan of the protracted grid-stare, and I shan’t be setting any more puzzles where the solver needs to find words in the grid but has not been given directions as to either (a) where to look, or (b) pretty much exactly what to look for.

18. 

    Alan B

    #18 - Fri 10th Jul 20, 11:57

    
    

    Triton
    Thank you for your magnanimous response to my comments.
    It’s goodbye to Andy, as you said yourself, but I’m looking forward to the next Triton puzzle.

19. 

    Kippax

    #19 - Fri 10th Jul 20, 20:38

    
    

    It’s been interesting to read these comments, and many thanks to Triton for responding. My personal view is similar to others in finding the endgame a little too much of a leap (I needed prompts to get over the line). That said, I am sad to hear that this might be the last we see of Andy L – I think the concept is great fun.

20. 

    Terrier

    #20 - Sat 11th Jul 20, 11:47

    
    

    I think Triton is being too apologetic about the endgame. Like several others here, I spent ages searching the grid for somewhere (probably Yakuza-related) to insert the full name of the captive. Eventually I gave up and passed the puzzle to Mrs T, who worked out what was required within a just a few minutes. Horses for courses, I suppose.

21. 

    Alan B

    #21 - Sat 11th Jul 20, 15:32

    
    

    Terrier @20
    You have given me a cue to make a further brief point, as I had a similar thought to yours. I too would not want Triton to be too willing to neutralise the snake-bite he clearly puts into his puzzles (I have attempted three of them) just to bring them into my scope and that of some other solvers. But it’s pretty certain that any further puzzle pitched at this level in the way I have described (requiring such mental leaps and grid-staring) will again be beyond me and others.

22. 

    Triton

    #22 - Sun 12th Jul 20, 11:46

    
    

    Kippax – I think it’s quite possible that Andy will be seen again, but not in an abduction situation 🙂

23. 

    Kippax

    #23 - Tue 14th Jul 20, 11:27

    
    

    Triton@22  Thanks, and I look forward to it! I hope that things will be less stressful for Andy next time 🙂

24. 

    Mr A Writinghawk

    #24 - Thu 16th Jul 20, 13:16

    
    

    I was late to the video chat where we were going to solve this, so my team-mates were just finishing up, having done it all except explain the location (which they’d found) of ANDY. All that was left for me was to notice SO BAD E MEN, so I’m glad there was that tricky extra step.

    We really liked the narrative element of the puzzle. Triton, if you’re in repentant mood I hope you’ll repent of your promise not to have Andy kidnapped again! I’d like to look forward to his future adventures.

25. 

    Vismut

    #25 - Fri 4th Sep 20, 09:41

    
    

    I’m late, very late, to this party, but I really enjoyed this puzzle, especially the clues, it was nice not to have to wrestle with missing or extra letters for a change. I didn’t get the end game though as I was looking for the Yakuza and unable to find them came straight to 15 squared. Don’t give up on Andy it’s a fun gimmick and all your own, something to treasure.

First‑time commenters will receive a verification email. Once verified, your comment will be approved automatically. Please check spam/junk folders.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.