Wall Street Journal hint grid: February 22, 2014

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal variety puzzle is a cryptic by Hex.  Some solvers might find it a little intimidating because the grid is unnumbered and you have to figure out where all the answers go. For those of you who fall into the “how do I start this” category, I’ve given you the locations of all the answers below the fold.

But before you click down there (actually it won’t be a spoiler since the key stuff is in white text and you have to drag over it to read it), here’s a tactical hint to solving that first problem yourself.

Step 1: write down the enumerations of the across answers in each row (how many letters are between the heavy lines).  Put that information on the left side of the respective row.  So for the first row, you would write “6, 6” since there are two six-letter spaces.

Step 2: write down the enumerations of the down answers that start in each row, starting with the top row.  That row will be “6, 5, 7, 5, 7, 6, 4, 7.”  Write that information to the right of the row.

Step 3: look at the sequence of enumerations on the acrosses you just wrote down and the enumerations of the across clues.  The clues start “4, 2 (total 6), 6, 6, 4, 5.”  Since there are three 6s to start this list, and four 6s in the first two rows of the grid, you know one of those four must be one of the unclued theme answers.

Step 4: Now after those 6s comes a 4 (clue d).  Where’s the first 4 in the grid enumeration?  That’s where answer d goes.  And conveniently d is not a real hard clue.

So now you’ve got your first answer in the grid.  Now keep looking for unique patterns in the enumerations and match the clues to the list you wrote down.  OK?  Now if you still can’t figure it out or you want to check your guess, look below the fold and drag over the letter of each clue to see where it goes in the grid.  

Click and drag to see the location of each answer.

Across	Location		Down	Location
a	5a		a	1d
b	9a		b	3d
c	10a		c	4d
d	15a		d	5d
e	16a		e	7d
f	17a		f	8d
g	18a		g	11d
h	20a		h	14d
i	25a		i	19d
j	29a		j	21d
k	30a		k	22d
l	32a		l	23d
m	36a		m	24d
n	37a		n	27d
o	38a		o	28d
p	39a		p	33d