EV1667:
Negatives by Stick Insect
Setter’s Blog
Words (some forming phrases) removed from clues are all preceded by “No” in November by Thomas Hood; the title and final word are indicated by having no-VEMBER in the grid.
Stick Insect writes:
A while ago, I won a new Brewer’s Phrase and Fable from a crossword entry. Browsing through, I came across the entry for November which quotes the Hood poem. No-vember immediately suggested a grid where VEMBER could be deleted and removing all the other Nos from clues seemed an obvious way to indicate the theme. Creating a grid with the right number of clues to allow a space between each word or phrase wasn’t hard with the help of QXW and I was able to achieve the puzzle in, for me, a fairly rapid time.
Checking that the theme would be findable on the net as well as Brewer’s did give me some pause, as there seems to be some different options available, with a longer version compared to that in Brewer’s. However, that didn’t seem to me to stop solvers from identifying the poem or to affect the endgame, so I decided it wasn’t an issue in the end.
My thanks to all who’ve commented and of course to the editor for the usual improvements.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared