Mephisto 2530 – Mike Laws

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Mephisto
A moderately difficult one this – about an hour to solve, though with a fair amount of looking up.

A few less words than usual – 16 each of across and down rather than the usual 18. And only an X away from a pangram too. Hope that doesn’t mean a mistake on my part! The boy and girl at 9 & 10 make a nice pair. Not sure whether FOUR… and FREE… at 1 and 31 are intended to be a pair too. I think I’ve found a minor mistake at 24D.

Across
1 FOURFLUSHER – FOUR=crew,LUSH=drunk in rev. of REF.=official. A four-flush is four cards of the same suit in poker, and a four-flusher is someone bluffing, presumably because these four are upcards and another card could be the fifth.
10 WOST – hidden
11 CLA(p),QUE=Manuel’s one-word catch-phrase in Fawlty Towers
12 SOMME=battle,LIER=”rile awful”
13 ILEITIS = (Lets, III)* – inflammation of the ileum
15 PER=a (as in a dime a dozen),AI=the Scrabble player’s sloth
16 NO.,TITIA(n)
18 ACH(A)E,AN – Achaea = ancient province and modern prefecture of Greece
21 IN=popular,TEGRA=great – one of those drug names in C
23 NOT A BIT = (Toby ain’t – Y)*
25 D(ER=re rev.)IG
27 KAROSHI = sudden death from overwork – O in shark*,I
28 BARPERSON – BARON = peer, round (a=PER,S(aloon))
29 ORE=seaweed,IDE=fish – the whole being an alloy imitating gold
30 JAR,L – a jarl being a Norse chief
31 FREEMASONIC = (frames I once)*
 
Down
2 (f)OOD,LES(s)
3 US(HERE,T.T.)E
4 FOOT(l)ING
5 L(AMIN)AR – LAR = Libya (IVR), Amin=”reliable Arab” is lurking in the “some first names” section of C
6 S(L)EPT – Irish tribes had septs, apparently
7 HALL,IAN – a hallion/hallian/hallyon is a lazy rascal
8 RUED=”rude”
9 SERVANT-GIRL = (re starving,L)*
10 WH(I,PP,INGBO=bingo*)Y
14 STEERSMAN=(means rest)*
17 MEAT-PIE – me=us as in “give us a job,(a tip)*,E
19 CA.,TAST(e),A – a block on which slaves were shown before sale
20 H(YDR=dry*)OUS(e)
22 BIHARI – someone from Bihar, India. HI! rev. in Bari, on Italy’s Adriatic coast
24 BRED,E – I think there’s a mistake here, as BREDE is “to plait” (archaic) and only the past tense, BREADED, is attributed to Spenser. So “plaited for poet” seems to be wrong twice over.
26 ZARF=fraz(zled) rev – a holder for a hot coffee cup. So when you pick up your coffee machine cup and need one of those plastic things to put it in, you can say “pass me a zarf, would you old boy?” Maybe not …

5 comments on “Mephisto 2530 – Mike Laws”

  1. Agreed a reasonably straightforward puzzle but needing quite a bit of devilling in parts. I checked everything twice over looking for that missing “X”!! I agree your comment about BREDE but there was nothing else it could be (yes, sadly I did look up words starting BX just to be sure).
    1. I think “to brede” may be a Middle English weak verb and the preterite first person singular may thus be the same as the present tense – Googled Middle English verbs to get that!
  2. I don’t time Mephistos, but I finished this within the day (on and off) without any real problems, so I would have thought it was more at the easy end of the spectrum of difficulty. At least it didn’t have the abundance of double obscurities which made last week’s so impenetrable.

    An enjoyable puzzle – I liked the “gotcha!” moments of finally piecing together 10dn and 1ac

  4. I found this one pretty easy too, but had a different idea of what a “Four-flusher” was.

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