This is the first Myrtilus I’ve blogged – the previous one (1118 on March 25th) was very difficult indeed and fell to Zabadak’s lot. There were plenty of tricks here but I was able to say look-ma-no-hands when it was finished and only resorted to Google etc. for blogging purposes. I can’t give a time because I printed it and took it with me for the weekend where we have no internet, and then did it intermittently as a welcome change of pace from stooping, kneeling and digging in the garden. Excellent puzzle.
This week, in comments on the Club Forum and here on TFTT, Peter Biddlecombe unmasked the setters for these excellent puzzles. Myrtilus is Bob Price, former successful contestant in the Sunday Times clue writing contest. Whatever he does elsewhere, this would seem to be his metier. I decided to leave in my speculations about the setter (written before the revelations) just to show how wrong we solvers can be. Definitions in italics underlined, where appropriate. Answers in bold caps.
Across
1. A Dean Koontz book cover with a characteristic style (8)
HIDEAWAY. HIDE=cover. A WAY=characteristic style. Supernatural thriller by the American author.
5. A god‘s love returned by a goddess (6)
OSIRIS. Egyptian god of the underworld. S with O=love backwards (returned). IRIS= Greek goddess.
9. Adam was the first reported poet (5)
CINNA. Roman poet. Sounds like (reported) the original sinner in the Garden of Eden, Adam.
10. Half a turn made by an eagle that’s like Browning’s thrush (5,4)
ERNIE WISE. The other half of the immortal comedy turn being Eric Morecambe (see 4d). This did make me wonder if Myrtilus might be Dean Mayer moonlighting. ERN=eagle. IE=that’s. WISE=Browning’s thrush. The reference is to Home Thoughts From Abroad where the thrush sings each song twice, lest you should think he never could recapture that first fine careless rapture. There was some discussion on the Club Forum of the spelling of the eagle and whether perhaps there was a dangling E because the more usual version is “erne”. Both spellings turn up regularly in the NY Times crosswords so it didn’t hold me up.
12. “Sebastian and his friend are more interested in — than heiresses” (Lord Marchmain) (7)
BELLINI. From Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Sebastian Flyte, son of Lord Marchmain, and his Oxford friend Charles Ryder (the narrator) are “aesthetes” – or “sewers” as Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew would have branded them. The homosexual subtext is present but unstressed in Brideshead.
13. He made Murphy signal the end of the race (7)
BECKETT. Samuel. Best known as a playwright but this is from his novel Murphy – characteristically nihilistic and absurd, with a strange chess game in a mental institution and a bizarre lethal accident at the end. I don’t fully understand this clue.
14. Misconstrue an ode and perplex a poet (9,4)
ALEXANDER POPE. Anagram (misconstrue) of AN ODE PERPLEX A. Very neatly done.
17. A novel description of the lead character from fans of The Beach? (4,3,6)
SONS AND LOVERS. By D.H Lawrence. The SON (Paul Morel) is the principal character in the novel. Here he’s joined by SAND LOVERS=fans of the beach.
21. His spider helped a friend with bee trouble (1,1,5)
E.B. WHITE. Anagram (trouble) of WITH BEE. The children’s story is Charlotte’s Web in which Charlotte the spider spins words into webs that save a small pig from the slaughterhouse. Lovely book but it went on the taboo list for bedtime stories because my daughters were distraught at the death of Charlotte. When I had to speak at the funeral of a writer friend named Charlotte I was as brief as possible and did little more than quote from the book – “It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer”. After September 2001 a 1949 essay (Here Is New York) by White for the New Yorker was found to have had a chilling prescience:
The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
23. This Nobel Laureate could be expansive without using a media company (7)
BRODSKY. Joseph – Russian American poet. BROD=expansive (broad without using the A). SKY=media company. Won the 1987 Nobel Prize for literature.
24. Incredibly small boat with music playiing (9)
SUBATOMIC. Anagram (playing) of BOAT and MUSIC.
25. The last king of Scotland to back Prince Myshkin? (5)
IDIOT. IDI and TO reversed (back). Idi Amin, former President of Uganda portrayed in the novel by Giles Foden and the movie adaptation of the same name, who may have awarded himself this fanciful title among others. The Prince is the title character in the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
26. A Marxist piece in this Art Review (6)
SARTRE. Jean-Paul, French existentialist writer and philosopher. Contained (piece) in [thi]S ARTRE[view].
27. One who’s not tried PG Wodehouse for a while (8)
INTERNEE. Double definition. An internee is a prisoner who has not been tried. Wodehouse was in Le Touquet in 1940 when France fell and was taken prisoner. The price of his freedom was a series of broadcasts on German radio. Not his finest moment. On his release he moved permanently to the US. Very clever clue.
Down
1. What upset an island queen? (6)
HECUBA. HE=what (eh) reversed (upset). CUBA=island. Wife of Priam in Greek mythology. She also makes a noteworthy appearance in Hamlet.
2. A brother primarily in an old play (9)
DONALBAIN. Anagram (play) of A B[rother] (primarily) IN AN OLD. If I’m not mistaken this is a deft illustration of an “and lit.” clue because the definition is implicit. He is the son of the murdered king Duncan and brother of the heir Malcolm in Macbeth.
3. A musical old lady turning lovey dovey (7)
AMATIVE. EVITA= musical. MA=old lady. Turn upside-down (turning) and voila.
4. An ideal notion of mornings: hosting 10’s partner and bible classes (8,5)
AMERICAN DREAM. Must admit I only parsed this for the blog. AM AM=mornings. Containing (hosting) ERIC (Morecambe, vide supra) AND RE=bible classes (relig.ed.).
6. Jolly Corner’s owner, a writer, parks up outside (7)
SPENCER. In the Henry James ghost story Spencer Brydon is the owner by inheritance of a childhood home he calls the “jolly corner”. RECS=parks reversed (up) containing (outside) PEN=writer.
7. “Ring of bright water” writer sounds wet (5)
RAINE. If you spent some time trying to make Gavin (as in Maxwell, Tarka the Otter author) work you are not alone. Instead it’s Kathleen Raine, as in homophone for “rain”. A line from her poem The Marriage of Psyche provided the title for the otter book. The real story behind this is a bit depressing.
8. A course to finish training a climber (5,3)
SWEET PEA. SWEET=course. PE=training. A. I only wish we could grow them but our summers are too hot.
11. Why a ham can’t get the sack in this Shakespeare love story (2,3,3,5)
NO BED FOR BACON. Novel by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon. Basis for the 90s movie Shakespeare in Love.
15. One’s boss is upset about one producing a thriller by Lionel White (9)
OBSESSION. Anagram (UPSET) of ONE BOSS IS yields the novel.
16. Mother superiors have saints, not bishops as judges (8)
ASSESSES. Remove the BBs from abbesses (mother superiors), replace with SS=saints.
18. A schedule set up without sex for a chap like Biggles (7)
AVIATOR. Could there be a hint of Anax cheekiness here? A ROTA=schedule reversed (set up) containing (without) VI=6 (sex in Latin).
19. Antigone’s end goal is controversial (7)
EMOTIVE. It took me a while to glom on to the definition but it does sort of work. The end of [Antigon]E with MOTIVE=goal.
20. This compiler’s half French: the one who moans a lot (6)
MYRTLE. MYRT=half of Myrtilus, the compiler or setter here. LE=French the. Quite a head-scratcher this.for some of us. Ghostly character from Harry Potter who haunts the girls’ loos at Hogwarts. Several on the Club Forum (including your blogger) had never heard of her which shows our age. My children were just that bit too old for the HP craze. It evoked a couple of things for me. At boarding school we were issued hideous “myrtle-green” tights for games so as to avoid any stray local males getting a glimpse of our stocking tops (we had absolutely no idea they could be so alluring, it just seemed silly). And then there was Elwood P. Dowd’s niece Myrtle Mae, in the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, who had a thing going with the orderly from the local mental institution where her uncle is briefly committed. He (the orderly) calls her Myrt.
22. A composer who gave us a music lesson (5)
WEBER. Carl Maria von – German Romantic composer of the early 19thC. The Music Lesson, the novel, was written by Katharine Weber – American author.
“OF MAN’S first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe…”
Perhaps the real truth of the first sin was not, after all, eating the fruit, but failing to give the woman proper credit.
I got a long way with this without looking stuff up. For some reason I couldn’t see through the wordplay on BRODSKY and trawled through Wiki’s list of Nobel winners until I found one that fitted. Then I got the WP. Contributed a big chunk of time to my 51.07
Nice to see Harry Potter listed in the canon of literature: sort of legitimises some of my deplorable reading habits. I knew Moaning Myrtle and her critical part in the denouement, though as often wondered whether that was already in JK’s mind when she introduced the character.
Excellent blog: I like having the three weeks to delve into the references. Perhaps if we go on explaining everything so well we’ll eventually leave our noble (and unmasked) setters with no surprises to spring.
Edited at 2016-06-10 06:52 am (UTC)
Thanks Z – I certainly went chasing my tail on this, forgetting to look for the cryptic.
And ONE’S BOSS as the anagram about one=I
By the way, you can easily and freely register on this site with create an account under the login button, it’s perfectly safe and lets the rest of us know who you are, or how you’d like to be known. This is a really good place to learn and enjoy the complexities of the cryptic crossword, and you’re very welcome.
I’ve put a copy of this post into 26,443.
You’re welcome! Great name choice, by the way.