DT 31386

Welcome, with a special welcome tinged with sadness to any solvers from The Independent who are trying out today’s Telegraph Crossword after that site terminated its own crossword on Saturday. There are several Telegraph setters who also set for The Independent, and despite the puzzles being uncredited, there is still a range of different styles and personalities shining through — we just have to play the additional meta-game of spot the setter!

Talking of which, I was delighted to meet both of our regular Monday setters, Heron and Weatherman, at the Sloggers & Betters gathering in York last month. At least one of them preferred not to be photographed (entirely reasonably), so you’ll have to take my word for it. They both thought Mondays would largely be alternating between them — however, if I remember correctly, one of them claimed last Monday’s crossword and t’other said they were doing November 9th, which is next week, meaning I’m no better informed as to who we’ve got today.

Another difference between the Telegraph and Independent crosswords is that the Telegraph‘s require a subscription. Generally I think this is a good thing: setters deserve paying for their craft, and we shouldn’t expect to be entertained free of charge. However, it does make it harder for new people to drift into the habit, being less likely to casually encounter a Telegraph Crossword and be in a position to know they’d like to subscribe.

When I discovered Big Dave’s Crossword blog and was interested in getting more into crosswords, the Telegraph Puzzles website at that time would offer one free puzzle a day, and once or twice a week this would be the cryptic crossword. I did those for a bit, and it was only once I’d become a fan of them that I took out a subscription. The current site no longer does that, but we do have a ‘Gift this puzzle free’ link on puzzles. So if there are any Independent solvers in your life, this week might be a good time to share them a gift link if there’s a Telegraph backpager or Toughie you think they’d like.

Away from crosswords, it’s been a busy fortnight for us: a wedding anniversary with a delicious meal at Arras in York (which used to be in Sydney), a browse round Topping & Co bookshop, and the new Ghosts film; running a family board-games event for half-term; a trip to London to see friends, the Aardman exhibition, the Quentin Blake gallery, and the Bayeux Tapestry; Light Night in Leeds, with dozens of different types of artwork featuring illumination in some way at venues inside and outdoors across the city centre; and Paul Heaton and The Lightning Seeds at Leeds Arena. One child is back at school today, t’other tomorrow.

Across

1a Heavy work by journalists given without limits (10)
OPPRESSIVE: Enter in order: a usual ‘work’; a collective term for journalists, traditionally those working for printed newspapers; and ‘given’ from the clue, without the letters at its outer limits.

Who can you spot in this video?

6a Ducks haircuts (4)
BOBS: A synonym for ‘ducks’, as in the physical action, is also the plural of a type of haircut.

10a Hospital medic, not working, getting rise (5)
SURGE: A medical professional who specifically works in a hospital needs the usual ‘working’ removing from their job title.

11a In favour of proposal for marketing (9)
PROMOTION: After a term meaning ‘in favour of’ we need a proposal, such as one that may be put to a meeting.

12a Prisoner, worn-out and sorry (8)
CONTRITE: The usual ‘prisoner’ is followed by a word meaning ‘worn out’ in the sense of a phrase that’s overused.

13a Robbery article by newspaper (5)
THEFT: This is a grammatical article and the usual ‘newspaper’.

15a Racing around drug trial (7)
HEARING: A word meaning ‘racing’ (in the sense of moving quickly) is placed around one of the usual single-letter drugs.

17a Nothing included in rent to Canadian city (7)
TORONTO: Insert the letter that looks like the number representing nothing into a word that means ‘rent’ in the past tense, in the sense of ‘it was rent apart’. After all that copy the ‘to’ from the clue.

19a Perpetually young wife leaves without income (7)
AGELESS: We need to think up a slightly contrived word which would mean ‘without income’, then make the letter indicating ‘wife’ leave it.

21a Merit of emptied double shot (7)
DESERVE: The answer starts with what remains from ‘double’ after its inner letters have been emptied out. The rest is a word that applies to some shots in tennis.

22a Flipping potato, perhaps, and squash (5)
REBUT: A planty word describing perhaps a potato or similar is flipped to be inserted from right to left.

24a Bargain revelation (8)
GIVEAWAY: The same word can mean something such a bargain that the price is insignificant, and an accidental revelation or spoiler of something secret.

27a Expression of surprise by Blossom, we hear, about new thickener (9)
CORNFLOUR: Start with a mince oath somebody might say when expressing surprise. Then we need another, general, word for what a blossom is (ignore the capital letter) and then to convert that to another word which sounds like that one when heard aloud. That goes at the end, with the surprise and the blossom-sound both going around the abbreviation for ‘new’. Honestly, I just thought of some thickeners and worked backwards.

28a Card game not good for newly-wed (5)
BRIDE: The clue is telling us to remove the abbreviation for ‘good’ from the name of a card game. So just keep thinking of card games until you get to one that’s 6 letters long and contains a G.

29a Unusual utensil holding instrument (4)
LUTE: The answer is held inside consecutive letters of the first two words in the clue.

30a Discourage jeans fabric being reversed and fixed (10)
DETERMINED: The synonym of ‘discourage’ goes in the normal direction. After it insert the name of the fabric that jeans are made from, reversed.

Down

1d Expel leaders of Oxford University student theatre (4)
OUST: Use the leading letters of the last few words in the clue.

2d Attendant concealing crime in church home (9)
PARSONAGE: A boy employed as an attendant conceals inside it a particular crime.

3d Choose treat celebrity rejected in part (5)
ELECT: Reject ‘treat celebrity’, so that it faces the other way, then find the answer lurking in part of it.

4d Throw over a penny for youngster (7)
SAPLING: A verb meaning to throw informally is placed over (in the sense of ‘around’, which is more normal in across clues; this isn’t the usual down-clue sense of ‘on top of’) the A from the clue and one of the abbreviations for ‘penny’.

5d Six fast to embrace love that’s intense (7)
VIOLENT: Start with six in Roman numerals. End with the name of a Christian period of fasting. Between them, make them embrace the letter that looks like a score of love in some sports.

7d Oscar with lodge in tree (5)
OLIVE: Start with the letter represented by Oscar in the Nato Phonetic Alphabet. Then we need another word for ‘lodge’ as a verb, describing where somebody resides.

8d Second lawsuit including name editor authorised (10)
SANCTIONED: This answer begins with the abbreviation for ‘seconds’ and ends with the short form of ‘editor’. Between those is a word that can mean a lawsuit, into which has been inserted the single-letter abbreviation for ‘name’.

9d Wrong user suffering agonies (8)
TORTURES: A legal term for a civil wrong goes above the letters of ‘user’ which suffer being in a different order.

14d Melodramatic articles on test involving Conservative (10)
THEATRICAL: Place multiple grammatical articles (one of them a repeat from 13a) on top of another word for a test which has been made to involve inside it an abbreviation for ‘Conservative’.

16d Discover or find yeti, surprisingly (8)
IDENTIFY: Arrange the letters of ‘find yeti’ in a surprising order.

18d Story of people crossing a river twice (9)
NARRATION: A term for a whole country’s worth of people crosses (as in, surrounds) two instances of the abbreviation for ‘River’. I don’t think that outside of crosswords I’ve ever seen this letter used to abbreviate all-lower-case ‘river’, but it crops up often enough that apparently it’s allowed.

20d Initially supercilious, disregard Italian bloke (7)
SIGNORE: After the initial letter of ‘supercilious’, we need a verb meaning to disregard or not pay any attention to somebody or something.

21d Various penguins, for example, heading for Europe (7)
DIVERSE: Penguins here are examples of something. Not chocolate biscuits, but creatures that perform a particular action in order to get food (or maybe they’re just practising for the Olympics?). That’s followed by the heading letter of ‘Europe’.

23d Royal Navy aboard clumsy ship that’s overturned and caught fire (5)
BURNT: We need a colloquial term for a boat that handles clumsily, then to overturn it so it reads up the grid, and to insert into it the abbreviation for ‘Royal Navy’.

25d Record of gangster meeting tramp (5)
ALBUM: The usual ‘gangster’ meets a slang word for a tramp, described by Chambers as especially North American and Australian, and which sounds derogatory to me here in the UK.

26d Female expected to return for clash (4)
FEUD: The letter indicating female goes first. Then it’s a word meaning ‘expected’ (as in library books — handily, this clue reminded me that I had one I needed to renew today, which I’ve now just done), returning to read from the bottom upwards.

Quickie Pun

In today’s quick crossword the first three answers are italicized, indicating that when spoken together they sound like another word, a phrase, or a name. Check them here:

FARE + MINE + DEAD = FAIR-MINDED

Recent Reading

If you like crime fiction and cryptic crosswords, you’re going to want to read Murder Most Cryptic: you’ll even enjoy the names of the cats. A body discovered at a support session for alcoholics — a setting which provides an interesting group of people who know each other but aren’t necessarily friends, and vary in age, job, background, and interest in cryptic crosswords. (“Eric had become obsessed with crosswords. People often took up something new when they gave up the drink, though Sandra did think he could have chosen something more interesting.”)

A cryptic clue is found with the body, and the crossword solver among the group explains it to the others, with varying success and interest. More clues crop up as the story continues. Oh, and one of the characters is called Nina, something that took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. Chapter 1 has the heading ‘Reader ignores obnoxious journalist and heads for wine (5)’, and indeed it is about a journalist, one with obnoxious tendencies, drinking wine. But obviously with that enumeration, it’s also a cryptic clue.

Every chapter has one, with the answer appearing somewhere in the that chapter’s text. Some I saw straight away, some I realized when I encountered the word in the story, and some had me re-reading the chapter, scouring for words of the required length (although one of them has the wrong enumeration). A few of the clues also crop up in the story, with their parsing explained by one of the characters. There’s no need for the reader to be able to solve them, and indeed the book’s been written so they can be completely ignored, but I suspect readers of this blog would enjoy solving them. The chapter clues then appear in complete crosswords at the back. Author Alys Cummings is also a setter, having been published in The Guardian and The Independent.

I enjoyed the characters, their flaws, and their interactions, and the writing style is clear and entertaining, without showing off or getting in the way, and the mystery is definitely above-average for the genre. At the event where I saw the author, the interviewer said something from which I deduced a significant part of the ending. They were being circumspect and very much trying not mention anything relevant, but the way in which they didn’t mention it struck me as slightly curious, and was just enough. So I don’t know how I would have fared at the mystery without that, but there are enough twists and red herrings that I think readers will be satisfied.