Sunday Times 4770 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
31:30. I thought this was pretty tough, although I was very tired last Sunday when I attempted it and very nearly dropped off a couple of times. Perhaps because I was half-asleep when solving it the first time, I couldn’t remember any of the answers when I came to blog it later in the week, and the new website doesn’t show you your answers unless you’re using the same device, which I wasn’t. In the end I had to print the puzzle and solve it again.

When I find a puzzle difficult, I usually struggle to pinpoint why after the fact, but having found some of these clues hard twice I am in a better position to opine. There are some pretty obscure words (fairly clued, I hasten to add), but also some very well-disguised and/or slightly oblique (but always fair) definitions, admirably misleading surface readings (11ac) and fiendish wordplay (24ac).

All in all I thought this was a challenging but very fine puzzle, for which thanks to Dean. How did you get on?

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (THIS)*.

Across
1 Protected church — provide walls
FENCED – FEN(CE)D.
5 Look more manly, son
BUTCHERS – BUTCHER, S.
9 Empty vehicle that one’s broken into
VAIN – VA(I)N. A nice easy starter clue that was actually one of my last in.
10 Satisfying food? Not round here
SQUARE MEAL – because a square is not round.
11 A lot of interest paid on plastic
PREDESTINATION – (INTEREST PAID ON)*. ‘Plastic’ is the anagrind.
13 Check filter again
RESTRAIN – DD.
14 Find fish on banks of river with it
RARITY – RA(R, IT)Y.
15 Gum in vacated lodge
CHICLE – CHIC, LodgE. I was unsure about this one but realised after submission that this must be where the brand name Chiclets comes from.
17 Try locks in pine box
TEA CHEST – TE(ACHE)ST.
19 Monument such as Pisa’s tower?
LISTED BUILDING – to list is to lean. I think this idea has come up brefore but it took me an embarrassingly long time to see.
21 Fix pockets for a coat with one type of wax
SPERMACETI – SET (fix) contains PER (for a), MAC (coat). Add I (one) at the end. I had to construct this painstakingly from wordplay, but then it seemed vaguely familiar. This usually indicates that a word has come up before, but I can’t find any evidence that this one has. It is a waxy substance obtained from the oil in whales’ heads, and not a type of fertility-boosting pasta as you might have thought.
23 Produce light left to right
GROW – GLOW with the L switched to R.
24 Most warm and intimate nurses
SNUGGEST – S(N)UGGEST. Tricky, this one: ‘and’ here gives N, as in fish ‘n’ chips.
25 Shoot a north European
GERMAN – GERM, A, N. I wasted ages trying to make some variety of Nordic fit here.

Down
2 Old enough to be a model
EXAMPLE – EX (old), AMPLE (enough).
3 Bridge over single channel in US state
CONNECTICUT – CONNECT (bridge), I, CUT (channel).
4 Reckless speed, reckless speed
DESPERATE – (SPEED)*, RATE. Nice!
5 Weapon that can’t be fired point-blank?
BLUNT INSTRUMENT – I don’t really understand this one. A point is not blunt and er…
6 No change of scenery over in Italian city
TURIN – reversal of RUT (no change of scenery), IN.
7 Every second of the day I’m clumsy
HAM – every second letter of ‘the day I’m’. I think this is HAM in the acting sense: Collins defines ‘ham acting’ as ‘clumsy acting’.
8 Reboot primarily due to a faulty data display
READ-OUT – Reboot, (DUE TO A)*.
12 Chanteuse of light entertainment?
TORCH SINGER – CD. A term that was only very vaguely familiar to me but I think it should be guessable from the checkers if you haven’t heard of it at all.
14 Very good gathering at home making friends again
REALLYING – REALLY (IN), G.
16 Very tight grip
HAIRPIN – DD, the first a reference to bends in the road of course.
18 Topless, for a gesture, first lady
SIGNORA – fOR A preceded by SIGN (gesture). ‘First lady’ is not Eve, for a change.
20 Explorer’s old copper comb
DRAKE – D (old copper), RAKE.
22 Badger caught by hunter again
RAG – contained in ‘hunter again’.

31 comments on “Sunday Times 4770 by Dean Mayer”

  1. I managed to solve this correctly but it took me 1:27:09, so as Keriothe says, quite a difficult puzzle. I think I started with VAIN and finished with SPERMACETI. Took a while to drag CHICLE up although I did know it. Hadn’t heard of TORCH SINGER before though. A challenging puzzle. Thanks Dean and K.
  2. You must have been very tired indeed, K, if it took you longer than me. I do remember puzzling over a couple–my LOI was 14ac, 2LOI 8d, and I only got SPERMACETI from the checkers, never figuring out the wordplay. Also biffed 1ac and 24ac, but solved post hoc. I don’t think I would have got TORCH SINGER if I hadn’t know the term, without the checkers in TORCH. A torch song, for young folks like Keriothe, is a song of unrequited love: ‘Mean to Me’ as sung by Ruth Etting, for instance. COD 4d; loved it.
  3. If you are not familiar with Dean’s unique style of setting,then you are done for.LOI CHICLE which l got after two days.
    Ong’ara,
    Nairobi,
    Kenya.
    1. Sorry, but “if … done for” cannot be true. Back in 2006, when I was a solver rather than in the xwd business as a day job, and Dean was unknown to me, I discovered his Anax puzzles site and tried some of the cryptics. They were certainly challenging but also solvable, and I thought the two or three I tried could have gone straight into a national paper. As an assessment of puzzles from a non-professional setter that is very rare indeed. (Dean had set puzzles for the Birmingham Post previously but I didn’t know that.). So I emailed him from the contact details on the site and suggested sending a sample puzzle to The Times. I discovered later that other people were giving him similar encouragement, so I don’t claim sole responsibility, but a few months later I got an email from the Times xwd editor asking what I knew about Dean, and describing the sample puzzle he’d just received as “really rather good”. Shortly afterwards the puzzle was used and Dean’s setting career was relaunched.
      The point of repeating so much detail is that neither I nor the Times xwd editor knew Dean’s style when we saw one of his puzzles for the first time. We just recognised the quality of the puzzles we tried. If I had found the puzzles unsolvable rather than challenging but definitely worth the effort, my part in the story above would not have happened. And if that quality had not been maintained in Dean’s puzzles in The Times and elsewhere, I would not have added him to the ST crossword team at the first opportunity when I became their crossword editor.
    2. I think Dean is currently the best cryptic crossword setter in England. I concede that not everyone does but then, “everyone” doesn’t agree about anything
  4. Completed all but 21ac but gave up on it as the hour approached and resorted to aids. On finding the answer, which I’d never heard of, I wish I’d persevered as I had worked out the possibility of PER (for a) inside SET (fix) and had the A and the I from checkers, so I was only missing the M and the C, but the ‘coat’ element eluded me completely and I wasn’t 100% sure my thoughts on wordplay were valid.

    I entered CHICLE from wordplay and was rather surprised to find it was correct. It has only appeared previously in Mephistos (which I don’t do).

    Testing and satisfying to a degree, but ultimately frustrating that I was unable to clear the final hurdle.

    Edited at 2017-11-05 06:21 am (UTC)

  5. Which is the fastest I’ve ever done this setter…their previous one, with the crossing of Willie Carson (who?) & Alton towers (what now?) was infinitely harder. This one was more fun

    Lucky I’d heard of spermaceti I suppose which I put in only half parsed, seeing it ended in I.

    Grow was my last one, had to be careful to not just chuck in glow

  6. Found this tough and came in at just on the hour, with CHICLE requiring an aid. I must remember CHIC for ‘in’. Penultimate SPERMACETTI, unknown but just about constructible. COD LISTED BUILDING. I liked BLUNT INSTRUMENT but I’m not sure it quite works. I hadn’t fully parsed SNUGGEST either. The setter was nearer the top of his game than the solver. Thank you K and Dean.

    Edited at 2017-11-05 07:39 am (UTC)

  7. Surprisingly I didn’t have any trouble with this one, knowing SPERMACETI and getting CHICLE from the brand name, only the TORCH bit was UK and guessable. 28 minutes 2 coffees. LISTED BUILDING worth a smile.
  8. I don’t have a time for this as the ST app doesn’t have that facility, nor did I know the setter in advance , but I remember being surprised by how smoothly it came together and to find out that it was one of Dean’s. I often struggle on his puzzles but the characteristically cunning concealed definitions seemed missing here and SPERMACETI was the only bit of unusual vocabulary. Just my day I guess.
  9. If I didn’t appreciate the concision of Dean’s clueing before, I do now. There is scarcely a word wasted. I’m thinking particularly of “in” in 15ac and “and” in 24ac, even though the latter is reduced to “n”. My only quibble is that I still don’t understand how the clue for RARITY puts R and IT inside RAY. Another clue which caused difficulties was 21ac -SPERMACETI. In the end I had to research wax in Wikipedia. COD to LISTED BUILDING which took me an inordiante time to solve but made me smile when I got there, as it did Pip.
    No time as I completed the puzzle on paper.

    Edited at 2017-11-05 10:30 am (UTC)

    1. The containment indicator is ‘on banks of’, i.e. on either side of.

      Edited at 2017-11-05 11:57 am (UTC)

  10. 49:27 so not too taxing. Only a couple of answers went in after the first pass and I thought I was going to struggle but I slowly managed to fill the grid without getting stuck anywhere for too long. FOI 9ac. LOI 1ac. Chicle known from travels in South America where at every town square, tourist attraction and transport hub enterprising kids carrying wooden boxes full of gum, sweets etc for sale would wander round crying “Chicle, Chicle, Chicle”. I half knew the word at 21ac (I’m wondering if from Moby Dick) but enjoyed it’s painstaking construction from wp. I’m another who can’t quite see how 5dn works, no doubt I’m missing something. Thanks for explaining 24ac which I just bunged in from definition and checkers – it had to be snuggest – without seeing how it worked. I liked 10ac and 4dn. COD 2dn.
    1. POINT BLANK is an archery term. If you are sufficiently close to the target you can ignore the effect of gravity and simply aim the POINT of your arrow at the BLANK (aka bullseye), hence point-blank range.

      Clearly you couldn’t do that with a blunt weapon, so I think the clue works rather well.

      1. Thanks for the explanation Mr Chumley. I knew there was something that I wasn’t seeing.
        1. Thanks, you’re welcome, although it appears I was wrong – see below.

          Edited at 2017-11-05 02:25 pm (UTC)

          1. There’s more than one way to skin a cat Mr Chumley (not that one should try that with a blunt instrument), I think your parsing works even if it was not what the setter intended!
  11. This was the first time I have got more than halfway with a Dean puzzle. And by the way I think the clueing style is brilliant.
    I gradually wore it down over the week until it wore me down with a few outstanding.
    I could not get Chicle (was looking for L…E); word completely unknown to me.
    For 21a I was looking for a type of wax and had Set … but again completely unknown.
    I had Muggiest at 24a and annoyingly got 14a wrong. And failed to get Hairpin. But I feel very pleased and was rewarded by the crossword.
    Thanks for the blog keriothe and a pleasure to meet you at The George yesterday.
    I will now look into establishing a Livejournal account; if my antivirus software will let me. David
  12. Thanks for the blog. I gave up without getting 15a or 21a but I found most of the rest straightforward. My explanation of 5d is above as a reply to special_bitter.
  13. Ok,l see what you mean editor(l suspect PB).Also used to read Anaxes website about how Rufus was his mentor and how at some moment he endured a dry stretch as a setter.
    Ong’ara,
    Nairobi.
  14. Thank you very much for the lovely blog Keriothe.

    Just a note on BLUNT INSTRUMENT. I like the archery idea, but possibly too obscure for most to see. The concept simply played on the idea of a point-blank/blunt refusal or response to something.

    1. Oh well, for a brief moment I thought I was the smart cookie!

      Thanks for a fine puzzle.

  15. As usual from this setter, this puzzle was a joy. I always look forward to Dean’s Sunday offerings. I thought 4d was brilliant and 19a was a LOL moment. All thanks to the setter for brightening my morning. 43 minutes. Ann
  16. For some reason I found this extraordinarily tough, even by Dean’s standards. First crack at it yielded very little, so I returned to it later in the week and eventually started to twig most of it, although the wax stuff, the chicle and the torch song all defeated me.

    Great blog K – I feel like I definitely dodged a bullet here on the blogging front! And well done on a sterling performance in the Championships by the looks of it. Thanks also to Dean – some lovely stuff, with the listed building being a real gem.

  17. It’s in Shakespeare, I Henry IV I think, where Hotspur complains about the King’s representative who comes to claim his prisoners. But no doubt in MD too. On edit: much to my surprise it is I Henry IV: And telling me, the sovereign’st thing on earth Was parmaceti, for an inward bruise;

    Edited at 2017-11-06 03:31 am (UTC)

  18. I meant to mention this earlier, but: I chuckled when I twigged to this clue, but then it occurred to me that while PREDESTINATION is a doctrine (and a highly repellent one at that), a lot is not; it’s what one is predestined to.
  19. This was the only clue for which we had to resort to crossword solver. Knew parmacetti from Hotspur’s speech in Henry IV but couldn’t extrapolate it to spermaceti.
    Dean’s puzzles usually take us days, doing bits here and there. We did this one in a couple of hours.

    As usual, thanks to all.

    Jan & Tom. Toronto.

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