24543 – Enid Blyton meets James Joyce and Svengali

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A very varied and enjoyable puzzle of two halves for me. After getting off to a flying start with lots of anagrams, a couple of references to books and at least two give-away clues I was surprised it took me an hour to complete it. The stumbling blocks were 1ac/dn, 3dn, 4dn, 21dn, 22ac where the literary reference eluded me until the very end, and 25ac. I may have spent more time on wordplay than on a normal solving day and I certainly went through a patch of “Blogger’s nerves” when I hit the wall and my mind went blank but it really shouldn’t have taken me so long. I expect a stroll in the park comment or two especially after the trials of the past couple of days and would not be surprised to see some very fast times being notched up by the hares but I’m afraid this old tortoise is going to have to remain satisfied with getting to the finishing post at all, however long it takes.

Across
1 DISPATCH – DI(SPA)TCH – To ditch something is to abandon or discard it.
5 SPOT ON – NO TOPS (rev)
9 LEG BREAK – Lancashire,EG,BREAK – A very helpful clue that’s right up front with its reference to cricket. It’s defined as a ball that spins from leg to off on pitching.
10 Deliberately omitted. Please ask if baffled.
12 BARRACK SQUARE – To barrack is to jeer or heckle and barracks are military accommodation. Square meaning old-fashioned or conservative seems to date from the 1940s and is thought by some to refer to music performed with a steady beat and no jazz rhythms.
15 RUGBY – RUG,BY – BY in the sense of nearby or close.
16 REALITY TV – Anagram ( trivial  variety)*. I was horrified for a moment seeing the second word had to be ?V until I remembered being caught out by this abbreviation once before.
17 TOMBOYISH – Another anagram (my boot his)*. George, short for Georgina, was one of the Famous Five in a series of books by the much maligned (by some) but nevertheless much loved (by others) children’s author, Enid Blyton. The other four in the gang were Julian, Dick, Anne and Timmy the dog. I would recommend taking a look at The Comic Strip spoof “Five Go Mad In Dorset” if you get the chance.
19 RIDER – Double meaning. Apart from the game named after it, Badminton in Gloucestershire is famous for its annual horse trials. A rider is also an additional clause in a document imposing a qualification or condition.
20 FINNEGANS WAKE – Anagram (Western fan seeking an)*. I wasn’t sure about W = Western as opposed to just West, but it’s in the COED. The title is an impenetrable book by James Joyce and also an earlier Irish ballad.
22 TRILBY – TR(1LB)Y – Yet another book title, this time by George Du Maurier. LB is short for Libra meaning pound in Latin..
23 ADMIRING – A(DeMo)IRING
25 DISUSE – DI, SU(Son)E
26 GRADIENT – GRA(DIE)NT – We have a choice of Generals here, Ulysses S Grant of the American Civil War, or James Grant on the losing side in the American War of Independence.
 
Down
1 DELIBERATE – Double meaning.
2 SAG – GAS reversed indicated by “climbing”. Gas and rabbit are both slang terms meaning to talk, not necessarily always interchangeable but close enough for our purposes.
3 ALREADY – A,L(abour),READY – So we’ve had both Conservative and Labour today but no mention of Mr Clegg’s lot.
4 CRACKBRAINED – CRACK,BRAINED – Two words meaning hit hard.
6 PUNJABI – P,UN(JAB)I
7 THE VERY IDEA – THIEVERY with its I (1) removed.
8 NOTE – This is ETON reversed indicated by “over” followed by two definitions of NOTE.
11 SQUASH LADDER – I don’t know enough about squash to know exactly how we get from a list showing the relative order of merit of a set of players to “tournament” but I suppose over a season some players move up to the next stage and somebody ends up winning. I think “run” = “ladder” may refer to damaged nylon stockings with “run” being the US term for the UK “ladder”.
13 RAGAMUFFINS – Anagram (unfair games)*.  “Spoiling” is the anagram indicator. Remove “e” for energy.
14 OVERWEIGHT – Anagram (to give wife her)* . “Failing” is the anagram indicator.  “Wife” is shortened to “w”.
18 Deliberately omitted. Please ask if baffled.
19 RESCIND – R(ESC)IND – This was made easy by ESC turning up only a couple of days ago and the very helpful presence of “computer” in the clue. As with the mention of cricket in 9ac the setter was possibly a little over-generous here.
21 STUD – STUD(y). The game being stud poker.
24 IRE – Hidden and reversed inside “American”.

37 comments on “24543 – Enid Blyton meets James Joyce and Svengali”

  1. My squash days are long over, but as I played it a squash ladder was a way of providing regular informal competition between members. The ladder consisted of cards with players’ names inserted in rungs on a board. Players could challenge a player not more than a specified number of places above them on the ladder – if the challenging player won the players swapped places on the ladder. It provided a winner at the end of the season, but more importantly gave players competitive games against opposition of roughly the same standard. Good fun.
  2. 12:23 for this, so no very fast time here.

    As an opposite to my notes yesterday, I was delayed by:
    12: “school” as an unhelpful idea for the second half
    16: similar trouble to Jack with TV as second word
    19: wrong kind of ‘Badminton competitor’
    22: refusing to believe that ‘??ILB?’ would get any hits in an imagined search
    2: initial punt on LOG from see=LO and a false fall=fell=log a tree (though {“rabbit, climbing” = G} looked so iffy that LOG was crossed out fairly soon)
    4: failing to see that “hit hard” is both past and present tense, so CRACK??????? wasn’t enough to see the answer
    6: looking for P({shot synonym})U, improbable though this is; not seeing shot=JAB
    7: running in terror from ???A as last word instead of using it as useful information
    19: not seeing the RIND despite having ESC as the key from the off
    21: thinking of TUTE (in my role as card game anorak), and trying to make “tutee” or a similar word bridge the gap to “learning”.

  3. I found this a little hard; and hit a wall somewhere (so that I looked at r-g-y for some time till I got it). 44 minutes finally. A little depressing that the traits of Blyton characters are considered fair game – though the anagram wasn’t hard. COD to 4. Interesting to see a speed merchant suffering from the same misdirections as the rest of us. It’s the rate at which the breed throws off the false spoor to find the true that’s so amazing.
  4. I also found this difficult and not particularly rewarding. I thought the use of present and past tense in Crackbrained was inelegant although I cannot see any stronger objection to it. I had a similar objection to the See… at the beginning of 2 although I know that it is a fairly common device for “You will see…”

    My parsing of “Press run” in 11 gave me Squash Handle so I struggled to get Gradient before changing Handle to ladder.

  5. 28 minutes, with the SQUARE bit of 12 and SQUASH LADDER the last in: I just did not see Q as the mutual letter. I’m also unconvinced by SQUASH LADDER as a grid entry: squash is not the only sport with competitions in this format, and wondered if we’d be accepting of marbles match or Go tournament, or tiddlywinks league.
    Like others, I was thrown by TV as a two letter word, but the whole made it as my CoD for its semi &lit quality.
  6. I found this a real grind and didn’t finish. However clearly I’m being particularly thick today because one of the ones I failed to get is 10ac – clearly so easy as not to be worth including in the blog. With leg raised to kick myself could someone put me out of my misery?
    I also failed to get CRACKBRAINED which isn’t the hardest clue in the world either. I’ll blame a late night.
    1. 10ac

      It’s INTENT. IN = trendy and TENT = a red wine. “Set” being the definition.

      1. Thanks. I’d actually jotted this down but dismissed it on the basis that I’d never heard of Tent as a wine and there couldn’t possibly be a wine I haven’t heard of. I suppose I might have thought of “tinta” and seen this as an anglicisation… but I didn’t. I’m guessing this is a crossword staple so it’s logged for the future.
        The other highly speculative one I’d noted down was INSEKT, but that looked too improbable even for me!
        1. TENT by way of tinto is indeed a crossword staple. Also worth remembering SACK = ‘sec’, as well as ASTI, BRUT, CAVA, HOCK, PORT, ROSE and VINO.
          1. Thanks. I’m familiar with all the others, so now I’ve got a full set!
            Sack is familiar to me from Shakespeare studies. Equating it to sec seems a bit odd for sweet fortified wine. However I also remember from my studies that very often in the field of etymology no-one’s really got a clue.
  7. It’s strange I think how some puzzles just have the ability to mildly irritate one. I didn’t find anything particularly difficult about this one – a standard 25 minutes to solve – but one or two little things just irked, which is a pity.

    I personally don’t like “see” in 2D or “cut” in 22A (where I actually think the clue reads better without it). And for me a tournament involves a process of elimination to find a winner, not simply a type of handicapping device to prevent mismatches of skill level. All minor stuff I guess but so easily avoided when setting.

    1. there is no shortage of tournaments that do not involve a process of elimination, as any chess player will tell you!
    2. I’m with you on 2dn and 22ac where both “see” and “cut” seem to me surplus to requirements. I think you’re being a tad pernickety in objecting to “tournament” as a def. for SQUASH LADDER. Agreed, an SL is mainly a device for ranking players in order of ability, but it is also an ongoing competition in which people play each other with the aim of improving their positions on the ladder. The person who ends up on top at the end of the year is in some sense the “winner”.
    3. I read it as “cut in” in the sense of interrupting. Not sure if this works but it seemed okay to me at the time for a final answer that had eluded me for far too long and being in a hurry to get on with blogging the puzzle.
      1. And I read “cut” as “abbreviated”, though lb. for libra = pound is an indirect kind of abbreviation.
  9. 14 mins, with a silly error, putting DESPATCH instead of DISPATCH even though it made a nonsense of the wordplay. Spent a couple of minutes coming up with CRACKBRAINED, which I’d never heard of, so was relieved to see it was right. Thanks for yet another excellent blog.

    As an aside, I get the impression from these blogs that the fast solvers go through the clues sequentially once, writing in all they can solve, before using crossing letters. I have always just dived in, normally at the longest clues, or where I can spot an obvious anagrind. I tried the first method today, and found it no help at all! Am I mistaken that this is an accepted technique, or is there any received wisdom on the “best” way to speed solve?

    1. There isn’t much “received wisdom”. My current basic method is to look through the acrosses until I get a definite answer. When I do, I look at the downs which (a) I haven’t looked at yet and (b) contribute a checking letter to an across clue I haven’t looked at yet. Then I return to the Acrosses. When I’ve got to the end of them, I look at all the unsolved downs, taking them left to right for the top half and then bottom half of the grid. Once there are checking letters to look at, I use them as soon as I can. I vary this a bit to test out possible across answers based on the implications for the downs, and times when an unusual checking letter is added to the grid.

      A couple of years ago, Mark Goodliffe wrote up a detailed account of his solving for the 2008 final. (Puzzles here.) If you read it, you’ll see that his way is different to mine. His way (assuming I ever really understood what it was) may be better than mine, but changing your method is a big investment – I tried doing things differently but I’m used to my way, and decided fairly quickly that any other method would take a long time to practice, with uncertain results.

      1. Very interesting, and many thanks for the link. I’ll try the puzzles first, and then read his account. I’m sure you’re right, though, that changing would be difficult.

        heaton_daniel’s point about the importance of starting letters is a very relevant one. More often than not I get my start in the least helpful place in the grid.

  10. Good blog thank you
    did in three strethes but well under the hour. got held up in north west corner. clever confusing surface at 1 across…all has been said…
  11. Jees! Don’t these people think we have things to do. Needed aids to get me passed a wall. Only 5 solved over my cup of tea (the 2 novels, LEG BREAK, IRE and THE VERY IDEA). Tended to overelaborate my thinking for GAS, STUDY, RUGBY and NOTE (couldn’t possibly just be Eton reversed?), so even the “easy” ones were a problem. Never heard of CRACKBRAINED or SQUASH LADDER. Oddly, I found this rather more difficult than the one raved about earlier this week.
  12. I found this a smooth solve until the bottom left corner where I was foxed by TRILBY, STUD and DISUSE. Made an error a few weeks back with DESPATCH BOX not DISPATCH BOX or vice versa so checked the wordplay of 1A carefully to make sure it was I not E.

    I thought the clues for SPOT ON, REALITY TV and RIDER were particularly elegant.

    In response to turnerjmw above:
    I’m not a fast solver by any stretch of the imagination but attach a lot of importance to starting letters, so having got DISPATCH straight off I then looked at 1D then having got that solved LEG BREAK, TOMBOYISH, etc.

  13. 17:04 .. Tuning into the wavelength of this was like trying to find Radio Luxemburg on an old transistor set in one’s youth – frustrating, but nice when you found it.

    A lot of clues that now look simple but caused me plenty of head scratching at the time. CRACKBRAINED was the last in. As lennyco says, it feels inelegant, but maybe it’s just proper cunning.

    REALITY TV is excellent (and you don’t hear that every day).

  14. This seems to be one of those puzzles where judgements as to difficulty vary quite widely. At 45 mins, I found it only slightly harder than yesterday’s, which was generally considered to be easy. A perfectly enjoyable puzzle, but, as others have said, no clue really stood out for wit or ingenuity of wordplay.
  15. 19:20 today so had a few problems. Would have been slower if I hadn’t once been a rung in a SQUASH LADDER.
    Also got the novels relatively quickly. There were a lot of clues which caused a stumble especially 18 where I had to resort to going through the alphabet for the second letter – really should have got this without resorting to that.
    Liked 16 as a clue- says it all really.
  16. Disappointed to fail on three, all of which I got close to. (Well, you’re bound to with so many checkers.) 1ac was a problem throughout and I ended up putting DISTANCE, even though I was working around SPA. CRACKBRAINED – I got as near as CRACK, but was done for by the change of part of speech. As for the easy one at 10ac, I thought of INTENT but discarded it on the misguided basis that ‘intent’ is a noun only (crackbrained I think about it now), as in “his first avowed intent – to be a pilgrim” from the old hymn.
  17. Couldn’t finish this last night, but newly rested eyes did the trick and I got there about 20 minutes after waking up. Another crossword where part wordplay helped out a lot, got SQUARE before BARRACK and SQUASH before LADDER. Only one from wordplay alone was TRILBY
  18. All these years and I have never known the correct way to have a ladder! When I was at school we used to have chess ladders, only the winner used to go above the loser and everyone dropped down a rung in between. This used to get annoying when decent players used to help their friends out by deliberately losing and propelling nobodies to the top of the tree. They would then take ages to drift down again on a one step basis. This was further ingrained by the same method being used in pool ladders at university – note the style of game becoming less erudite and more alcohol-related as the age increased. So all this time I have despaired at the unfairness of ladders, when all along I was victim to the wrong rules!

    ..Oh, and on the crossword it was average fare, with only CRACK-R-I-E- causing grief, especially since I started by thinking it was a type of BAT so ended with an S!

  19. In three interrupted spates, slow, quicker (found all the anagrams), quicker still to finish but no exact time, must have been about half an hour all told. 19 & 24, 26 the final group.
  20. I did really badly on this, but my excuse is I’m on holiday this week, so my brain is not in gear. Grateful at least that I got FINNEGANS WAKE, given that I was photographed beside James Joyce’s statue in Trieste yesterday. — Gradese
  21. 15 mins, finishing in the SW with DISUSE. I was a little confused by the definition used for FINNEGAN’S WAKE; perhaps the setter was reluctant just to call it a ‘novel’? My approach is like turnerjmw’s insofar as I dive in, but I start with the shortest answers.

    Tom B.

    1. The setter uses “novel” in the very next clue so I imagine “book title” might have been an attempt to add some variety.

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