EV 1772 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1772 (Hints)

Shifted by The Ace of Hearts

Hints and tips by Phibs

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The nicknames given to professional darts players encompass the trivial (‘Chizzy’ for Dave Chisnall and ‘Webby’ for Mark Webster), the distinctly unsubtle (‘Voltage’ for former electrician Rob Cross and ‘The Flying Scotsman’ for Musselburgh’s Gary Anderson, albeit something of an upgrade on his previous moniker, ‘Dreamboy’), and the plain weird (‘Darth Maple’ for Canadian John Part).

But every now and then (just as with footballers – I’m thinking here of ‘Ollie’ for Imre Varadi and ‘Onesize’ for Fitz Hall) a good one crops up, and whoever decided that Watford-born Alex Roy should be known as ‘The Ace of Herts’ at least showed a little imagination. Sadly, Alex’s professional darts career was unspectacular, but mention of the Ace of Hearts always puts me in mind of him.

Preamble: One letter must be SHIFTED within each clue (in some cases with adjustments to spacing) to enable solving. In clue order these letters spell a definition of a three-word phrase which must be highlighted in the completed grid. Chambers (2016) is recommended.

This promises to be interesting: in every clue, one letter moves to another position in the clue – it could move forwards or backwards, and the new position could in the same word or in a different part of the clue entirely. Added to that, the spacing may be adjusted. So if a clue were “One on our unit fears hot baths (11, three words)”, the letter H moves and the space between ‘on’ and ‘our’ is removed such that the clue becomes “One honour unit fears hot bats”, the answer being ACE OF HEARTS [ACE + (FEARS HOT)*].

The setters’ trick to be aware of here is the one where a letter is either gained or lost by a word in the clue to produce a word which has a single-letter abbreviation, eg ‘eight’ could gain an H to make ‘height’, yielding H in a wordplay, or ‘plough’ could lose a P to make ‘lough’, abbreviation L. Apart from that, what you need to look for is words which are not usually seen in cryptic clues but could produce a more familiar word through the addition or subtraction of a letter, eg ‘rushed’ for ‘crushed’ (anagram indicator) or ‘nettling’ for ‘netting’ (containment indicator).

Note that a letter which leaves its original place in a definition is not underlined below, nor is a letter which is added to the definition (irrespective of where it comes from). So if the original definition were ‘roubles to me’, wherein the T moved to produce ‘troublesome’, the definition would be shown as ‘roubles to me‘.

Across

1a  Act he caught pals circulating (5)
The interrupted underlining and the information that the moving letter doesn’t leave the definition should be sufficient to prompt a consultation with Chambers.

12a  Sheepdog in Hamilton eeks continuously (8)
A 4+4 charade leads to a word not from Hamilton, Scotland or Hamilton, Ohio but Hamilton, New Zealand.

13a  Surgeon did meet Beth with a mate say and succeeded (8)
You may well (like me) get the answer to this one from the definition. After the letter has moved, the first three words of the wordplay (though I think ‘met’ would perhaps have been fairer than ‘did meet’) contribute a three-letter word to the answer, the fifth to seventh (plus the relocated letter) provide a two-word indication by example of a four-letter word, and a single-letter abbreviation brings up the rear.

16a  Measurement of e.g. boa, newt in branch, both cut in half (6)
It is the word BOTH which is ‘cut in half’ (actually, ‘cut by half’), thus furnishing the last two letters of the answer.

18a  Pink tallow ails keenness of perception (6)
There are eight separate headwords with the spelling ‘pink’ in Chambers, and the one that’s relevant here isn’t the first – and most common – one, though you won’t have to search too far through the remainder.

22a  Veteran mounted tinker say following hit locally (6)
Once you’ve determined where the letter is moving to, a look at Chambers will guide you to a five-letter word that constitutes all but the first letter of the answer.

26a  Spenser’s to rave about turning in tape (5)
The tricky aspect of this clue is moving a letter into the definition, so turning a common verb into a less common one.

28a  Stake Australian collected by Pat on account of returning cereal to North Americans (7)
After the appropriate migration, two abbreviations are contained by the reversal of an archaic word (it’s an adjective, not a preposition, so the word ‘of’ in the clue should be ignored).

31a  Honey pit in the country to bury independent death notice (8)
The wordplay here involves an anagram of a one-letter word (also seen in 22a), two words from the clue, and a single-letter abbreviation.

33a  Swede, back at last, gathers support for Scottish barn tack say (5)
The underlining, together with a look at Chambers, should help you to make sense of the definition.

Down

6d  Brief a star in hunting yard on terbium (6)
One chemical element turns into another in this 3+1+2 charade, the first word of which will be familiar to all, but the required sense whereof will probably not (the ‘start’ has the meaning of ‘head start’).

20d  Radio East rid unknown illegally established power (7)
The result of the letter movement and the elimination of a space is a relatively unusual containment indicator.

21d  Soon pass in holding breadth for a month (6)
Finding a word in the clue which can lose a letter and then yield a single-letter abbreviation will help you to unravel the wordplay…

27d  Rube has brief image to domineer lover (4)
…and much the same applies here, but with a word in the clue receiving a letter to produce a word with a single-letter abbreviation.

29d  How with close-cut hair to get drugs (4)
The distance moved by the migratory letter here could not be greater.

Definitions in clues are underlined (but see note above)

If there are one or two letters missing from the message, you should be able to work them out, and this will help with the outstanding clues. Once you have a full grid, completing the assignment is unlikely to detain you long – the three-word phrase will probably spring to mind, and looking for its last letter in the grid should result in a mercifully brief search.

A puzzle where many of the clues were not simple even when the necessary corrections had been made, but the endgame was undemanding.

Phibs Toughness Rating: 🥾🥾🥾/🥾🥾🥾🥾 (All the difficulty lies in the clues)

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