Forced Entry by Mr Lemon

Gareth Rees, 2010-04-02

Several ways in: Listener crossword 4077.

Listener crossword 4077: Forced Entry by Mr Lemon (2010-03-13)

Today, the rubric gave only an explicit entry method, with no other requirements: nothing to highlight, no quotation to discover, no penny to drop. “The wordplay in every clue indicates the answer with an extra letter that is not entered in the grid. That extra letter must be added to or subtracted from one letter of the answer (A = 1 or 27, B = 2 or 28, etc) to produce the grid entry, always giving a word or personal name; the change never takes place in an unchecked cell.”

The instructions said “A = 1 or 27” but significantly not −25, so it looked as though I would never be required to subtract a larger letter from a smaller (this turned out to be the case). I wrote a short program to do the additions and subtractions and dictionary lookups:

dictionary = set(map(lambda x:x.rstrip(),
                     open('/usr/share/dict/ukacd').readlines()))

def all_entries(answer, extra):
    a = ord('a') - 1
    for i in range(len(answer)):
        for j in [-1, +1]:
            adj = ord(answer[i]) - a + (ord(extra) - a) * j
            if adj <= 0:
                continue
            elif 26 < adj:
                adj -= 26
            yield answer[:i] + chr(adj + a) + answer[i + 1:]

def dictionary_entries(answer, extra):
    return sorted(set(all_entries(answer, extra)) & dictionary)

It was tough going, because the intersecting letters didn’t give much help, as I always had to bear in mind that they could have been wrong. And that meant the issue remained in doubt until the very end, because even with only one unchecked cell to fill, the final entry was still a challenge: it was very hard to see from the letters BOS_ that the wordplay might involve “Governor” ⇒ BAN.

There were a few cases where there were alternative possibilities for the entry (for example, 31d was MERE with extra D, so could be entered as MARE, MENE, MERI, MEVE, or MIRE), but they were all resolved by the intersecting words. The only clue where I’m still not certain about the wordplay is 13a.*

If I have one small criticism of the puzzle it’s that the grid contained a high proportion (nearly 30%) of entries ending with S.

* The wordplay for 13 across is “bow” ⇒ OAR “people of fashion” ⇒ TON, with extra A (thanks to Shirley Curran).