Mephisto 3154 – I would have said Jeff…

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Mephisto
This was a really classic Don Manley puzzle, with the wordplay from words you know yielding answers that you probably don’t know.    This, for me, is the chief pleasure in solving these things, although as you begin to expand your vocaulary you may venture for a biff or two.   I did know thesps, tortile, noyous, cauld, omer, gomoku, kraken, and fatamid, so I was able to do a fair bit without consulting Chambers.   The only clue I thought was verging on unfair was that for enarch, but it may be that others will see how it works immediately. 

I would advise you to remember the answers, but it really isn’t of any use – there’s an endless supply of obscure words in Chambers.   You’d do much better to remember the wordplay words like bi and ked, which come up all the time. 

Across
1 Practitioner of magic gets response in Arab country (6)
OBIMAN – O(BI)MAN, with Manley’s usual Chinese medicine.   If you know obi/obeah, you might biff.
5 Guess about winter month becoming fresher (6)
BEJANT – BE(JAN)T, easy cryptic, hard word – a first-year man up north.
10 Favourite worker keeping not very well? Only sparkling a bit (9)
PETILLANT – PET(ILL)ANT, another easy cryptic. 
11 Actors in the places such as Bath not active (6)
THESPS – THE SP[a]S.
12 Line in insect — colour gone (4)
BLEE – B(L)EE.
14 Twisted priest to run around (7)
TORTILE – ELI + TROT backwards.
15 Troublesome old boy about to grab second person (6)
NOYOUS –  YOU in SON backwards – note that old goes with troublesome, not boy as the surface reads.
16 Old head covering needed by daughter? Fiona’s not warm (5)
CAULD –  CAUL + D.   I tried cowld for a while, but the crossers got to me after a while.
17 Put earth around a withering plant (7)
TURPETH –  Anagram of PUT EARTH minus A.
23 Repudiates Fleet Street etc in declamations (7)
RECANTS – R(EC)ANTS, yes, Fleet Street is in EC.
25 Theatre getting reproach in the auditorium (5)
ODEUM – Sounds like ODIUM.
26 Basher of duds in conflict — time to move on (6)
BATLET – BATTLE with one T moved forward.     Apparently, a word that doesn’t really exist.
28 Yarn written with pen, page being out of order (7)
GENAPPE – Anagram of PEN, PAGE.
30 Measure coming with Home Rule (4)
OMER – Hidden in [h]OME R[ule], and a well-know crossword word to boot.
31 Game with fiddle — all right after order is introduced (6)
GOMOKU –  G(OM, OK)U.  A gu is an actual fiddle from Shetland, and not an obscure form of swindle.    I knew Go was derived from Gomoku, and was able to biff this one. 
32 Most bad-tempered row that is on street after start of curfew (9)
CRANKIEST – C[urfew] + RANK + I.E. + ST.
33 King, dissolute fellow, bit of nasty monster (6)
KRAKEN – K + RAKE + N[asty].
34 Enclosure had to be put back after appearance of harmful fly (6)
KEDDAH – KED + HAD backwards, where the answer was not a word in my vocabulary.
Down
1 Not apt to work? One makes a choice (6)
OPTANT – Anagram of NOT APT.
2 Couple having sex upset this writer (4)
ITEM – IT + ME upside-down.
3 Writer’s transgression — gosh, is policeman brought in?! (7)
MISCOPY – M(IS COP)Y.
4 Strange pal I only start to understand at most (5, two words)
AL PIU – Anagram of PAL + I + U[nderstand].   It’s in Chambers, but I’m not sure why.
5 The fellow joining graduate society, a group once in parliament (7)
BASOCHE – BA SOC + HE, a bunch of French medieval thesps.
6 Reversal of bent pipe requires rare hard graft (6)
ENARCH – C(R)ANE upside-down + H.   R for rare is not in Chambers, but is in Collins.  Thanks to Jeremy for the parsing, as I was looking at arc or arch.
7 Plant discovering metallic element in sulphate (6)
ALLIUM – AL(LI)UM, lithium, I believe – are there any chemists in the house?
8 Lined metal, face of it having been scratched, could be this (9)
NIELLATED –  Anagram of LINED [m]ETAL
9 Cheryl, resembling a well-off country girl? (6)
TWEEDY -[Cheryl] TWEEDY, never heard of her, but the answer is obvious enough.
13 Pure model done out as a swimmer in the sea (9, three words)
LOUP DE MER – Anagram of PURE MODEL,   Well-known, but I can’t find it in Chambers.
18 With drug comes hallucinatory experience (taste not good) (7)
TRIPTAN –  TRIP + TAN[g], a drug for migraines.
19 Exceptionally fit maid, one in an Islamic dynasty? (7)
FATIMID – Anagram of FAT MAID.
20 One goat with another almost falling in sunken wood (6)
BOG OAK – BO(GOA[t])T.   I don’t think of boks as goats, but they can be goats as well as antelopes.
21 Nitrogen trichloride’s turned up in American plant (6)
SENEGA – AGENE’S upside down – we definitely do need a chemist!
22 What physicist here could produce weather map? (6)
AMPERE – WHAT AMPERE is an anagram of WEATHER MAP, a trick compound anagram where I wasted a lot of time trying to use here instead of what.
24 Keep quiet about solicitor’s past crime in Glasgow? (6)
STOUTH – S(TOUT)H.
27 Skunk beginning to eat bit of worm (5)
ATOKE – ATOK + E[at], classic Mephisto words.
29 Looking angry about duck having tiny eggs (4)
ROED – R(O)ED.

11 comments on “Mephisto 3154 – I would have said Jeff…”

  1. 6D wordplay is just (CRANE<)+H. One meaning of “crane” in Chambers is “a bent pipe for drawing liquor out of a cask”. Never say never, but there are plenty of abbrev’s in C, so I’d be reluctant to add ones from elsewhere unless they seemed well-known.

    I had to check Cheryl Tweedy too, but the idea of Don working in his study listening to Girls Aloud raised a laugh.

    1. How does the wordplay work here Peter? I can’t see how the word ‘rare’ fits in. ENARCH is designated as ‘rare’ in Chambers but the word in the clue can’t refer to just ‘graft’. However I can’t see any reason to apply it to H.
      1. Well, as the editor, I’ll take the rap on this one. There was a change in the clue as a result of an editorial suggestion, and I failed to notice that the new clue had “rare” in a place where it can’t apply to the right word.
        I should have noticed, but I quite clearly didn’t.
  2. This mostly went in relatively quickly (for me) but I was stuck with several at the end for quite a while… The BI in 1A and the SE corner gave me the most trouble. LOI ATOKE for which I had to do an alphabet trawl not knowing the skunk or worm segment. I did spot CRANE at 6D, though. Nice puzzle. Thanks Don and Vinyl.
  3. I felt 21d was bordering on the unfair – an obscure plant clued by an obsure chemical. In the days before Google, which I used to find what nitrogen trichloride was, this would have been nigh impossible.
    1. Looked at individually, yes. But there are times when the puzzle being a crossword matters. I don’t think any of the 4 clues to answers supplying checking letters are really hard. If it’s your last answer and you realise that “nitrogen chloride’s” rather than “nitrogen chloride” may be there for a reason, you can look at SENE?A possibilities and soon see it (assuming that you’ve noticed what “turned up” is most likely to mean). If not, you look at ?ENE?A ones for each of 26 possible first letters. For this kind of puzzle in the pre-internet days, I did that kind of thing many times.
      1. I didn’t click on the S being read that way, since it could equally well work as an abbreviaton of IS. I have fond memories (not) of similar dictionary trawls.
  4. Not too difficult a puzzle. The grid here is an interesting one, with the 90-degree symmetry and four 9-letter lights it felt like solving four mini crosswords.
  5. I found this one really hard. I had a wrong answer somewhere in the NE (I can’t now remember what it was) that held me up for ages.

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