EV 1717 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1717 (Hints)
In Absentia by Gaston
Hints and tips by Gabriel

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Gaston often seems to have French themes, so you perhaps would have expected Wicksparrow’s recent offering to have been a Gaston oeuvre – though who knows? Setters have many disguises. Anyway, I don’t think I’m revealing too much in saying that this puzzle’s theme is non-French.

Preamble: Four of the eight thematically connected unclued entries are searching, and four are being sought; the two groups are linked by a character that is IN ABSENTIA. 27 clues contain a single extra letter to be removed before solving. Read in clue order, these letters give two of the character’s nicknames: one from across clues and another from down clues. In the initially-filled grid, solvers should identify the character’s real name found in a straight line, dealing with it appropriately in order to remain IN ABSENTIA. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended; 26 is in OED.

Whenever I see OED mentioned I start to worry since I don’t have an edition. Wiktionary you’ll find is a good alternative though (someone will have to tell me how to access the actual OED online from abroad without spending a fortune).

By the way, I’ve started to use the competition (OpenAI instead of Gemini), only to discover that it wasn’t much help with the preamble other than the following basic tactic to spot an extra letter: “Check for redundant indicators — e.g., an anagram indicator and an extra unused letter in the fodder” but you knew this already.  To be fair though, this is a very common mechanism in this kind of puzzle.

Slightly more than half of the clues have an extra letter (27/50)  – and since removal must leave real words for the clue to be coherent, usually the number of potential candidates is fairly small.

Clues:
Across
14 Hold letter when Roosevelt’s wife drops it (3)
It’s the other Roosevelt.

19 Cape flaps around new organs (5)
The wordplay requires you to remove a letter to produce 3-letter nounal adjective producing a 4-letter synonym that I was unfamiliar with.

21 Gaston’s hair rejected by school – it has lots of tiny legs! (8)
Another technical term describing centipedes. Don’t forget who set this puzzle: wordplay is a two-letter possessive, a 3-letter reversal and a  3-letter synonym.

26 Dance avoiding bad drink (4)
Thank-you indeed to wiktionary.  Wordplay involves removing a 2-letter word from a dance.

29 Native American losing half of coat sleeve (6)
Piper Aircraft has a series of planes named after Native American tribes. It’s unclear why but the French insist on calling the English Channel something sartorial.

32 Military mound protected by sage Germans (5)
Once I had parsed the clearly signaled wordplay, I needed the BRB to confirm the unfamiliar definition.

39 Daily overlooking newer face (4)
LOI (last one in) – answer is a common synonym but I struggled with the wordplay (so “phone-a-friend”): need to remove a 3-letter synonym from a 8-letter synonym.  Don’t forget about interlopers.

Down
6 Having reduced peel and oil liquid, I cover up opening in crock (8)
This has a complex surface with several words that don’t really go together which should hint that they are needed as fodder. Once you remove the extra letter, a technical definition will be required. The wordplay is a charade of a 3-letter jumble, a 3-letter reversal of a synonym and single letter and another single letter.

 23 100m² having good shifting dunes (4)
The plural of this 3-letter dune is non-standard and from Arabic.

30 Hunting tube ticket torn in half (7)
Another case of decoding the wordplay (a 4-letter synonym from the Latin, followed by 3-letters derived pretty clearly from its literal fodder) only to wonder what the answer might mean – the BRB to my rescue.  

39 Fuel of every primary colour on the counter (4)
You’d think “every primary colour” would yield RGB but we have an imposter to eject first.  “On the counter” has nothing to do with tables and but as it’s used in counter-clockwise”

Definitions in clues are underlined.

The perimeter clues filled themselves in quite easily, at least once the top-right became clear. The four have an obvious pairwise affinity. The second message emerged first and I had a pretty good idea who our character should be. 

Of course I was wrong and I needed the first message to course correct. Which led me to a reference which I had to read in its (enjoyable) entirety. Don’t forget to deal appropriately with the real name in the grid – the relevant reference is pretty clear about the expected outcome and the relationship between the searchers and their targets. 

A relatively easy challenge compared to the last few EVs but nonetheless satisfying.

Toughness: 2 out of 5 on the difficulty scale.

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