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Star Quality

In some ways this is a fairly simple tale.  But it reflects an occupational hazard for crossword setters.  I found myself, for reasons I can’t now recall, looking at a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram on a Wikipedia page, and seeing it instead as a squared grid with a diagonal.  And, yes, MAIN SEQUENCE had twelve letters!  And then I saw how TEMPERATURE and LUMINOSITY could fit – and a large part of the grid structure was in place.  I decided that the giants and supergiants would have to share accommodation, while the close juxtaposition of WHITE DWARF pointed me at the need for a few jumbled entries.

All astronomers know the H-R diagram (where H is plotted against R). And Hertzsprung is one of those glorious words where you pause partway through to consider that, yes, you are still typing consonants (did he ever visit Knightsbridge, I wonder?), so a shoo-in for a potentially implausible hidden message.  And there we were, back at the point where you just have to knuckle down and write the clues.

Star Quality suggested itself as a title early on – but wait! Did I not already have a puzzle with such a title in my oeuvre? It was an ‘Inquisitor‘ from a period when it wasn’t called that.  So perhaps this puzzle should be an Enigmatic Variation?  And, much as I’d like to claim I have a definite mental picture of which puzzle goes to IQ and which to EV, sometimes it just comes down to a fact like that!

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About me

This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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