Quick Cryptic No 102 by Flamande

13 comments on “Quick Cryptic No 102 by Flamande”

1. The button went directly to the correct puzzle today. Hurrah!

   14 minutes for this one though after writing GLAZIER in immediately I struggled a few moments to find another answer.

   GRAY has to be the intended spelling at 23ac. The poet is Thomas Gray whose most famous work unusually includes the writer’s surname whenever mentioned informally i.e. Gray’s Elegy (Written In A Country Churchyard). The usual British spelling of the dull colour is ‘grey’ and that provides us with the homophone signalled by “sounding” in the clue.

   I agree ‘left’ is in 7ac for the surface reading. The setter could just as easily have used ‘put’, but something is required and ‘left’ has the additional misdirection factor leading us perhaps to wonder whether it’s cluing an ‘L’.

2. 10:10, but I forgot that the poet was Gray not Grey. I was also nicely misled by ‘left’ at 7ac. ERRANT I thought was a very good (sc. difficult) hidden, especially since it has such a smooth surface; I’ve found that one way to spot a hidden is if the surface reading doesn’t make much sense, but here… Lawyer=DA (district attorney) is yet one more often-used clue to keep in mind.
3. I found this difficult and took about 35 minutes to complete but with an incorrect grey. On reflection the hyphen indicates the colour is the homophone and the poet the definition.

   The extra L in 7a puzzled me and was wondering whether it indicates that the W needs to be placed to the left inside TILL.

   Never come across stores as an indicator of a hidden word, it was a tough but good clue. ENTRAP was another tough clue. Last one in CLEAN which I failed to parse.

   1. Could be the left hand side of Wife!!
4. Took me almost an hour. I too didn’t see the workings of 6dn, just the definition. Obvious after reading the blog.

   As always most enjoyable.

   Eurc.

5. I had lots of difficulty in parsing some of the clues. I eventually managed to find the word CAN. However I was left with a PARENT for ENTRAP rather than a PARTNER briefly, jumping the gun I suppose!!
   1. I was lucky enough to spot the definition ‘catch’ and thought of entrap and only then worked out the parsing. If you went down the parent line it might be worth pointing out that the definition is nearly always at the beginning or end of clues.
      1. I also spotted the ENTRAP but I could not parse it. Never before, have I had to use so many aids, anagrams, crossword solver and dictionaries. However it was good for me and I enjoyed it

         Edited at 2014-07-29 03:46 pm (UTC)

6. Roughly 4.45 with no real hold-ups. The ENTRAP/ENTICER crossers were my last ones in. I didn’t have any problems with gray/grey because I always associate gray=dull as a US spelling, and I was 99.9% certain the poet was GRAY.
7. 7:24 and I found this trickier than normal. Maybe the big boys’ puzzle had left me looking for things that weren’t there.
8. Not sure I can call myself a beginner any more given this is No 102, so from someone who is pretty hopeless at these, I enjoyed today’s puzzle even though I only managed to do about half of it. On reading the answers I felt I should have been able to get them, so hope returns! Thanks again for the very helpful blog.
   1. Completing half doesn’t sound hopeless to me. More to the point, how much would you have done to start with? Even more to the point are you enjoying getting to ones you do and working out the ones you don’t? Completing a grid isn’t the be all and end all (but it is a target to aim for).
9. Thought this was an excellent offering, with just the right amount of difficulty to make a satisfying solve. With the quickies, I’m finding that clues I’ve missed first time round are more readily gettable with some checkers in place than with “big brother”, where I can spend far too much time staring blankly at a clue with most of the checkers in place and still not see the answer.

   Nigel from Surrey

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