EV1721
At the Bottom of the Grid by Ifor
Solution
Removed letters can be arranged as NEBUCHADNEZZAR, who expected to see CHAR (burnt remains), ASH and BONE (in the original grid) when sending SHADRACH, MESHACH and ABEDNEGO into a fiery furnace, but they survived.
Setter’s blog
The genesis of this puzzle was the realisation that Meshach contained the letters of ASH, and the recollection that CHAR in Shadrach could also be a noun. Gratifyingly Abednego was also prepared to cooperate with BONE; even more pleasingly, it proved possible in each case to place the residual letters into words that could be appropriately truncated in a way that left the three of them standing “at the bottom of the grid(dle)” (with presumably an unshown fire beneath their feet).
I then followed my usual practice of constructing a proof-of-concept grid prior to thinking about how solvers might be led to the theme. That for me involves marrying possible clue groups with thematic pointers in terms of their lengths (I prefer not to use “13 clues contain an extra letter” or similar), so when that of Nebuchadnezzar conveniently matched the number of remaining down clues in my trial grid, I decided to go with that. Normally I would regard jumbling the prompt as introducing an inelegant complication, but the prospect of placing those Zs in predetermined and consecutive clues did not appeal and would have led to some dreadfully clunky clues. As it was, those were naturally the first two letters to be wrestled with. On, then, through the usual process of construction, testing, submission and amicable wrangling with the editor (one clue in particular went through several evolutions). I hope the end-product proved to be an enjoyable challenge; my impression from comments is that the biblical story is one of those “as every schoolboy knows” facts that probably applied with much greater force when I actually was a schoolboy.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.