Quick Cryptic No 198 by Felix

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
I found this a little harder than those offered on most of my Quickie blog-days; it was almost on a par with Monday’s Times Cryptic which I tackled at the same session and romped through in 15 minutes; this one took me the same. No obscure words, but an English seaside resort name which may be unfamiliar to overseas solvers.

Across
1 THICKSET – THICK (unintelligent), SET (group); def. squat.
5 SIFT – ST (saint) with IF (poem) penned inside, def. riddle, as a verb. New solvers should absorb this regular chestnut: see ‘poem’, think ‘IF’. I wonder if Mr Kipling would be chuffed to know how his work is so often referred to, if not read.
7 BATH – BAT (sports club, the implement not the society), H (hospital); nudity would be the norm when you’re taking a bath.
8 SOMBRERO – SOMBRE (grave), R (robber, initially), O (old); def. hat.
9 SKEGNESS – SK (ski, mostly) EG (say) NESS (head); def. seaside resort; one of the few I have yet to visit and (a surprising fact to me), rated number 1 in Britain of 60 towns surveyed in 2005 as ideal retirement places, by a leading magazine (see Wiki).
11 ATE – ETA = estimated time of arrival; reversed. Def. worried.
13 OBEYED – OBE (medal from the Queen), YE’D (old form of you’d); def. kept, as in observed a law, ritual or diet.
16 DAMAGE – DAM (barrier), AGE (time); def. injury.
18 ADO – AD (trailer), O (ring); def. trouble.
19 REBELLED – RED (crimson) has BELLE (beauty) inside; def. rose, as in rose up against authority. This took me longer to twig than the other clues, having this meaning of ‘rose’ well disguised in the surface.
20 ONCE-OVER – Self explanatory double definition.
22 ZOOM – ZOO (collection of animals), M (medium); def. sort of lens.
23 JEAN – Girl’s name, shortened JEANS = trousers.
24 ECSTATIC – (CATS ETC I)*, def. transported.

Down
1 TABASCO – TAB (bill) AS (when) CO (firm); def. fiery stuff. A famous brand of hot pepper sauce, a small vial of which is seldom far from my meal table; also the variety of chilli peppers used in it, which allows the word here to escape infringement of the ‘no brand names’ rule.
2 IN THE RED – IN (fashionable) THERE (present) D (daughter); def. overspent, perhaps.
3 SUSPENDER – (UNPRESSED)*; def. elastic strap, holding up your ‘pants’ in America and your stockings (or socks) in Britain.
4 TOM – Chap’s name, shortened from TOME (large volume).
5 SURINAM – (UN ARMS I)*; def. nation.
6 FORELEG – Part of quadruped, hidden word in hoo(F OR ELEG)ant.
10 SIDEBURNS – SIDE (team) BURNS (itches), def. facial hair.
12 TAILCOAT – TAIL (pursue), then COT with A (article) inside; def. formal attire.
14 BALANCE – B (middle of elbow) A LANCE (a spear); def. rest. In the sense of ‘he paid me the balance of the money’.
15 YOU’RE ON – (Y NO EURO)*, the Y for YEN, def. it’s a deal.
17 ENDEMIC – END (stop) E (eastern) MIC(E) = vermin briefly; def. found in a particular area.
21 VIE – VICE (clamp) with the C (about) removed; def. struggle.

19 comments on “Quick Cryptic No 198 by Felix”

  1. Very tricky for me. I thought I would not have time to finish it, but everything started to unravel once the little groups at 13/18ac and 11/16ac went in.

    Sports club and rose both took me up the garden path! Good fun.

  2. 13 minutes, so definitely on the tricky side. Clues like 7 BATH, 13 OBEYED, 17 ENDEMIC and 19 REBELLED are card-carrying members of the full cryptic corps. Owing to my inability to see the relatively easy ZOOM, I actually was thinking about ‘ectopic’ at 17, and even wrote in the invented ‘endetic’, having ruled out ‘eidetic’ only because by that time I’d managed to suss out that the word must begin END-.

    Skeggie will sort out the tied-up-handkerchief-on-the-head brigade from the others!

  3. 8 minutes, so this one evidently suited me quite nicely.

    Edited at 2014-12-10 08:25 am (UTC)

  4. Some may have read the book by a South African journalist that uses cryptic crosswords as an organising device, called ‘Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose’, which is how I knew I’d met this clue almost verbatim before.
  5. Fairly steady going, with some time taken to recall the horrible Kipling poem (as someone once said, If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you probably haven’t grasped the situation). SKEGNESS no problem, since it’s been in a Concise or two recently. 7:50, I think.
  6. Cracking puzzle – challenging without requiring arcane GK/vocabulary (although SURINAM was an unknown and was LOI based on anagram fodder, cross checkers, and a hunch), and good fun.

    Great to see Skeggy getting an outing! It’s juxtaposition with sideburns and suspenders was particularly inspired for those of us who recall it as the poor man’s preferred venue for a dirty weekend in the ’70’s (“have another glass of pink, Elsie”)

    COD to REBELLED. Thanks to Felix and Pip.

  7. 14 mins with the last minute spent on 8a. I thought I was looking for a grave robber, maybe an archaeologist. I thought the S at the start was ‘initially seen’, so I stuck an O after it for old and luckily the hat eventually jumped out t me. As is often the case, my LOI turned out to be my COD.
  8. Only 12 mins but felt like 25 because of the number of false avenues I went down in my head! Having got the t and the o I kept trying to make sense of “tobacco” instead of “tabasco” (well, you can set it on fire … errr …), “moustache” was my first thought for “sideburns” and “huntcoat” for “tailcoat”!! Deary me. Got there in the end.

    I liked SOMBRERO and my COD was ONCE OVER. I didn’t like BATH (no, a bat is not a club!!) or ATE (doesn’t really mean “worried”, unless combined with “away at”).

    Many thanks to pip for the blog, and to ulaca for posting the reminder of “Pretty girl in crimson rose” which was lurking at the back of my mind but wouldn’t come to the front!

    1. SOED
      CLUB noun.
      A stick or bat used in various ball games, esp. golf.

      Collins
      EAT
      Cause to worry. Make anxious.

      Edited at 2014-12-10 10:05 am (UTC)

      1. Oh wow, a dictionary, what an astonishing idea, obviously I’d never have thought of that …

        “Sporting club” for “bat” just isn’t very good, in my view. A golf club isn’t a bat, and a cricket bat isn’t a club.

        As for “eat”, yes of course it can mean worry (durrr). But it’s very hard to make “ate” mean “worried”. As I pointed out above, if you add “away at” it makes sense – “It ate away at jackkt so much that he had to get his dictionary out”. But without something like that it doesn’t work – “It ate him” doesn’t mean “It worried him”! “What’s eating you?” makes sense in a worry context, but “What ate you?” doesn’t.

  9. I’ve never seen ‘You’re’ used as an answer before and I never want to see it again. There were some very obscure clues here, not suitable for a ‘Quick’ crossword at all. Just my opinion. Most days I really enjoy this crossword, not today sadly.
    1. I have a half memory that in Ye Olde Days an apostrophe would be indicated in the numbering (so it would have read 3’2, 2). Now I write that down though it looks weird, so maybe I’m wrong!
  10. Definitely on the tougher side. I wonder if the clue for REBELLED was a nod to the famous* “Pretty girl in crimson rose” as mentioned by ulaca. I thought the definition in 24A was transported not wild, but arguably either works.

    * Well, kind of …

    1. Yes, the definition is transported. Ecstasy, transports of delight etc. the wild is to flag the anagram.
  11. ‘a little harder’ turned out to be impossible for me. Very frustrating couple of hours. Invariant
  12. A trickier one, which I’m not sure newer solvers will like. I thought there were a few too many old chestnuts in it for a quickie, i.e. bat, ate, ye’d, etc.. Didn’t worry me too much as they seem to be such standard fodder in the main crossword, but can understand why they annoy.

    Never thought of my bat as a club when I was playing cricket. But thinking of Beefy in his prime he would ‘club’ the ball over the boundary, as well as caress it through the covers. I’m not quite sure how you’d use a club to caress something though 🙂

  13. Much too hard for me. Now it’s bedtime I’ve given up and am reading your excellent blog to learn from my mistakes.
  14. Tough one today. Many thanks for the see-poem-think-If comment. Tips like that keep me coming back to this blog!

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