Enigmatic Variations 1761 (Hints)
HEROES by VAGANS
Hints and tips by Gabriel
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A very 2026 question to ask is when will my profession/skill be superseded by an AI? Vast amounts of literature is being dedicated to that issue. Ccase in point, when I left Google last year it was clear that software engineers shouldn’t be writing code anymore: the whole nature of engineering is changing very rapidly. When will it catch up with us, the cryptic solvers and setters?
Preamble: Names of HEROES (including a symbol) make up the unclued clockwise perimeter. Each clue contains a surplus character that must be removed before solving; in clue order these hint at the theme. The remaining hero must be highlighted in the final grid. The Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended; one answer is an abbreviation.
I’ll be honest, I consulted one of the other AIs (sorry, Gemini) and it was actually pretty astute. ”One perimeter cell holds a non-letter. Two readings worth keeping open: either a name contains a punctuation character occupying its own cell (a hyphen as in SPIDER-MAN or ANT-MAN, an ampersand, a full stop, a digit), or one “hero” is itself denoted by a symbol rather than a name. The cell-count arithmetic will usually settle which.” There’s a real hint in there.
Also it noted: “…it says character, not letter — so the extra could be punctuation, a digit, or a space, and the resulting message may contain them too.” And another real hint.
Not bad at all Claude!
It’s very helpful that there’s no ambiguity about which clues generate an extra character (I almost wrote “letter”) for the message. They all do.
Clues
Across
7 95 in unorthodox hordes sang in past for money before Lent (7)
Remember the comment above about character vs. letter.
15 Old-fashioned thrill of carousel when tattered case removed (4)
The comp. anag. (sometimes called a subtractive anagram) is clearly signalled – and there aren’t many valid options for the result but you’ll likely need to consult the BRB to confirm.
21 Old girl drops Liberals, but takes time to abandon lover (4)
Wordplay involves removing a single-letter abbreviation that itself involves removing a single-letter from a word in the clue.
27 Journalist tracking Dominicans for personal column in rage (4)
Underlining will hint at the only likely word that needs to be mutilated. Wordplay is a two-letter abbreviation for an order followed by the omnipresent 2-letter abbreviation for a journalist. There was a long discussion on a recent Guardian crossword thread about the answer – to me it’s quite a familiar term, but that’s perhaps due to my American passport.
33 Tax on worthy returns for character from Tel Aviv (3)
In this case, “character” really does mean “letter”.
Down
4 Beloved girl featured in faked smears (4)
Confirm the meaning in the Chambers “Some First Names” appendix which sadly is only available in the print edition (Oh, Esteemed Chambers Editors!, if you’re reading this…).
5 VIIIth note to do with Kansas sandpipers (6)
Indeed you’ll need to remove character not a letter.
6 Gave extra strength to old Fred installing new stuff in kitchen (9)
The underlining reveals we need an obsolete synonym. You’ll need to insert the obvious abbreviation and a secondary definition of a synonym in its container.
17 Quin has ego destroyed making antimalarial compound (9)
The answer was unfamiliar to me (Chambers to the rescue) but the anagram is clearly signalled.
20 Twit starting late fits out short terrace (8)
LWPU (last wordplay understood) so deserves a mention. Wordplay is a decapitated 6-letter synonym followed by an abbreviation which in my opinion is unnecessarily signalled.
26 Stir up old Arian endlessly with issues in odd places (6)
Fiddly wordplay. It’s worth remembering that often the role of proper nouns is to simply provide fodder.
34 Dispense with slough and jump on ice (4)
As far as I know (which isn’t every far), there are only two 4-letter ice skating jumps – this is one of them.
Definitions are underlined.
It would have been helpful had the preamble indicated that the emerging message needs an apostrophe – but even without that you can probably use the power of modern search engines to find the reference (which is a slightly more modern version of a 14C work). And like all good cryptics, once I had completed the wiki-research, I learnt something new.
BUT… it took me a long time to get David Bowie out of my head.
Difficulty 2/5
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Once I got [back] into the Setter’s head [academic, obscure, ecclesiastic] the clues were pretty straightforward and the start of the spelled-out hint emerged quickly and surplus letters could be predicted fairly regularly. A google of the 3 most obvious guesses at the perimeter names confirmed the spelled-out theme and the rest of the perimeter could be completed. I think the required apostrophe is there to be extracted with its follower, tho’ that isn’t strictly in accordance with the preamble. The remainder wasn’t hard to spot.
A nice straightforward challenge. Thanks to Vagans and Gabriel.