EV1630
Mixed Doubles by Ifor
Setter’s Blog
Correct letters give SHERRIFF, writer of JOURNEY’S END. Twelfth Night contains the line “Journeys end in lovers meeting”; jumbled across entries give pairs of lovers from Shakespeare or mythology.
Sometimes, once a theme suggests itself it then takes a while before the means of realising it develops to the point of usefulness. But occasionally, as here, the whole thing presents itself to one as a fully-structured concept immediately the idea has arisen. Thus my first task was to identify pairs of (fictional!) lovers with the requisite number of letters plus a central one to cross with Journey’s End. Various websites were trawled, with muted celebrations as each pair was found and tested successfully against the further criterion that they anagrammed into a pair of words of decent lengths. That done, the grid could be built around them. After some tinkering I was able to reduce the number of normal acrosses to eight, which would allow me my usual self-imposed rule of specifying gimmicked clues to generate Sherriff; having not used misprints for a while I decided on this approach. Incidentally, a hint to aspiring setters is that you should first decide on the misprints (or any other gimmick) in principle for every treated clue before writing any one of them; it may prevent some impasse being encountered part-way through. That completed, and the clues written, it remained only to go through the usual procedure of testing, submitting and tweaking as requested. I hope the result proved an enjoyable challenge.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.