Solving time: Approximately one hour, in two sessions, the second one lasting just 10 minutes.
Tucked away in the grid of the thematic crossword “An American side table” by Biddle are the pseudonyms of crossword setters (shown in bold blue below), old and modern. The solver twigs to the theme within minutes, if not seconds, of taking up the puzzle but may take a while to realise that all these proper nouns begin with the letter A.
Initially I put in a wrong answer at 15ac, without of course fully justifying the answer, and that was one reason I was held up for sometime.
I found the bottom-left quadrant the most difficult and I bet most others too would have been in the same ark. For fully understanding two answers (at 3ac and 22dn), I sought help from a friend.
As for the significance of the title, “An American side table”, it’s nothing to do with any imported piece of furniture. I take it that ‘side’, in the sense of a sporting team, suggests that there are a total of 11 proper nouns dispersed in the grid, and ‘table’ denotes the list that we have here. The rest eludes me.
Across
1 AZED – AZ (extreme letters), ED (editor)
3 ARAUCARIA – A R (
11 CAVIAR – CAR (Rolls-Royce) around VIA (by way of)
12 ADAMANT – ADAM (a man), ANT (a worker)
14 CURRENCY – Cryptic definition – ‘real’ is a monetary unit and and ‘rhino’ means ‘money’
15 AUCTOR – AUC + TO + R – AUC is from L. ab urbe condita, meaning ‘from the founding of the city (Rome)’
18 NARROW – Replacing M (money) by R R (rights) in WOMAN and then reversing it. ‘Bigoted’ is the definition for word required. As long as we keep ‘bigoted woman’ together, the solution will elude us.
20 HAZARDED -Anagram of HARD and AZED (the solution at 1a), ‘sorting out’ being the anagram signal.
23 ARMONIE – ARM (body part), ON (leg, that is leg-side in cricket), IE (that is). I would have preferred the fuller form ‘that is’ rather than “that’s” for the L. id est.
24 DRIVER – Double definition – Motor vehicle owner/ club (as in games such as golf). Is a ‘motor vehicle owner’ necessarily a driver?
26 CONGA – Homophone of ‘conger’ – Conga is “a Latin American dance in which dancers are linked in single file and move forward in a series of steps and side kicks” (Chambers); ‘conger’ is a large fish of the eel family. – The very last to go in for me; I did an alphabet run in my mind for letters that could go in the unchecked squares, figured out the word and looked up.
27 CHAINED UP – I (one), NED (man), U (uniform) inserted in CHAP (another man)
28 THEME PARK – MEP (politician, Member of the European Parliament) inserted in THE ARK (famous ship).
29 ANAX – AN (an) + AX (feller, or that which fells, American because this is US spelling. The
Down
1 AXIS – A (a) + XIS, reversing SIX, a boundary hit in cricket.
2 EN CLAIR – ENC (enclosure) + LAIR (private place)
3 ALBERICH – AL (almost ‘all’) + BE RICH (“have a lot of money”)
4 AXEMAN – Anagram of ME and ANAX (the solution at 29).
5 CONFABULATIONS – Anagram of BIANNUAL COST OF, ‘garbled’ being the anagram signals. Both the long entries (this one and 8dn) are anagrams.
6 REDRAFT- RED (revolutionary) + RAFT (boat)
7 AFRIT – A (a) FIT (part of an old poem) going around R (for Rex, king). Why the adjective ‘old’ is qualifying ‘poem’, I don’t know.
8 UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE – Anagram of DUNDEE WAS PICK O’, ‘cooking’ being the anagram signal.
13 ICON – I (current) + CON (abbreviation of Conservative, member of Cameron’s coalition
16 RUDE – RUE (regret) taken around D (daughter).
17 AARDVARK – A(A), RD (way, abbreviation of road) inserted in A(a)
19 ROMANCE – ROMAN (Catholic) + CE (church, for Church of England)
21
22
23
24 APEX – PE (Physical Education, exercises) inserted in A (one) X (ten)
I’d better explain the rather tortured stuff about titles first. The three titles I thought of just after writing the puzzle were “A-list” as used for celebrities, “A team” and “A side” (both based on the fact that there are 11 thematic answers, matching the number in a soccer or cricket team). “An American side table” was supposed to give you two words for A (an, American (abbreviation)) and then two words indicating one of the second words in my titles – side for ‘side’ and ‘team’, table for ‘list’. So far, no-one has told me that they worked out this bit successfully, which is probably my fault. Rishi’s attempt is the closest I’ve seen.
A list of the setters for those who don’t recognise all of them (some details culled from Azed’s “A-Z of Crosswords” book, and the recent Penguin book of FT puzzles):
AARDVARK: Mike Warburton in the Financial Times – also Scorpion at the Independent. A long time ago, I commented on some of Mike’s early attempts at setting.
ADAMANT: Hazel Goldman, FT again. Hazel also writes dual cryptic/plain def puzzles for some Scottish papers.
AFRIT: A F Ritchie – setter of early Listener puzzles and father of clue-writing standards – “Afrit’s Injunction” (quoted here) says it all. Sample puzzle here, book here
ALBERICH: Neil Shepherd in the FT. More puzzles from Neil and various others at his website
ANAX: Dean Mayer – Anax in the Independent, Loroso in the FT, and on the Times team. A bit of his Times history here and here.
APEX: Eric Chalkley, a carpenter from Croydon who admired Ximenes and decided to “ape X”. First person to get an MBE for “services to crosswords” or similar. More details including a link to about 22 puzzles here
ARAUCARIA: Long-standing star setter at the Guardian, with a relaxed attitude to rules about clue-writing. I hadn’t realised until Googling that you can now commission Araucaria puzzles for your own special events. More details on the site with this biography. Puzzles can be found with the Archive search facility here. Also Cinephile = (chile pine)* in the FT
ARMONIE: John Dawson in the FT, also responsible for an internet equivalent of A Wainwright.
ASCOT: Listener pseudonym of Allan Scott, who writes puzzles for the Times and (as Falcon) the FT.
AUCTOR: Listener pseudonym of Mephisto setter Paul McKenna, also Jason in the FT. Like some other bloke round here, educated at Eastbourne Grammar school, though not at the same time.
AZED: Jonathan Crowther, carrier of the Ximenean torch at the Observer. Occasionally seen as Ozymandias, and Gong in long-ago Listener days. Also has many puzzles findable with the Guardian/Observer site search – choose by “puzzle type” this time.
Other stuff:
14A: This was intended as two defs – “I could be real”, and “rhino”. But you got the important points.
24A owner/driver – fair point, made by someone else (though they said they couldn’t see how to change the clue to get round it)
5/8 both being anagrams – a tactical decision to help people struggling to remember/derive all the setters towards finishing the puzzle
7 “old” is there because “fit” is an archaic word – though “verse in old poem” is admittedly a bit indirect for “archaic (verse in poem)”
17 ark used twice- fair point, which I should really have noticed.
I worked out “A-Team” from your heading, and wondered about “A league of their own”.
I confess to trying to put ANUS instead of ANAX, but decided that this was not a Private Eye crossword!
Whenever I see ARAUCARIA I am always reminded of one of his puzzles that appeared in the Guardian Weekly about thirty years ago. As I solved it, the name and address of a pub in or near Long Preston, Yorkshire appeared, with a recommendation to enjoy its hospitality. Now I live near that part of the world I wish I could remember its name.
John A