The Times Cryptic Crossword Number: 24079 – No, No, No

Author   foggywebPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Hello – that was quite a struggle. Only managed about half of it on my first 45 train journey. Didn’t even complete it on my way back. So that’s about 90 minutes right there. I finished off about 6 minutes later – so let’s say 1 hr 36 mins – easily (!) the most difficult Monday for some time (for me). It didn’t help that I only had a black pen and had quite a few wrong bits and pieces all over the place.
I think the last in was RHODE ISLAND RED at 5D – might have been quicker if I could make out the D at the end of the second word.
Didn’t know BRINDLED, PIZZICATO, SOI-DISANT or SUZERAINS – I felt quite sure the first two were correct but feel lucky to have got the last two right!

Across

1 RE’S,CUE – RE=Royal Engineers – didn’t tnotice the apostrophe, so was looking for a four letter word meaning sign. Sigh.
4 BRI(N)DLED – didn’t know the word BRINDLED and not sure I really knew that meaning of BRIDLED. Hard.
10 PIZZ(1,C)A,TO – some music thing to do with plucking. Never come across that with my guitar, which is all I know about music.
13 ELEMENTALLY = ELEMENTARY with R replaced by LL
14 FI(E)ST,A
16 STEP[HEN]SON – I think I’ve seen similar before but I only got after comparing with 17D.
22 UNFEIGNEDLY – anagram of ‘denying fuel’ – I orinally wrote in something else but I can’t make it out!
28 T(AH)ITIAN – Titian has been in the news a lot recently, so this came very quickly.
29 L(A)UNCH – this took ages, by the time I got here I was so concerned I didn’t even think of A=area.

Down

1 RAPT,OR
2 SUZERAINS – sounds like ‘Sousa reigns’- I think I had vaguely heard of Sousa, but never have I come across Suzerainty. Well hard.
5 RHODE,1,SLAND[e]RED – RHODE sounds like rode.
6 NAP,H(THEN)E – I think HE is High Explosive.
8 D(ALLY)ING[o]
9 LAKE,TANG,ANY,I(K)A – knew the lake, spelling held me up – wordplay was hard. IA = Iowa.
15 SOI-DISANT – anagram of SAINT IS O[d]D – never come across this before – looked the most likely, though.
17 STEVENSON – STEPSON with VEN for P – first dead Scottish writer I thought of – and lead me back to getting 16.
18 ADJU[s]T,A,NT – NT = New Testament.
21 DEA(R)TH
24 YAL,TA – YAL = LAY reversed.

32 comments on “The Times Cryptic Crossword Number: 24079 – No, No, No”

  1. [Pre-blog comment]

    I expect other people will have found this a breeze, but for me it wasn’t the Monday romp we have become used to; about 40 mins.

    Even then I may have had a little advantage – 9dn sprang straight to mind as it come up in a trivia quiz last week (Africa’s deepest lake), and I spent some years as a child not trying very hard to play the violin, so I knew 10ac.

    A good puzzle and a bit of a tester to start the week.

  2. Gave up with four unsolved after an hour and resorted to on-line help. I still don’t understand all the answers. Never heard of BRINDLED or SUZERAINS. Not the start to the week I needed.
  3. What happened to the Monday doddle? No real complaints, but to meet this lot while suffering the after effects of too many glasses of Sunday red was something of a shock! Had to resort to my computerized cheats to finish in under an hour. COD 18 Dn. Apexes??? surely Apices.
    1. APEXES is in Chambers as an alternative plural.

      Definitely not as easy as most Mondays. 13 mins, having entered a few without checking wordplay.

  4. I thought this had several really hard clues…Not sure i undestand the workings of 9 down although i can see why the answer is the answer…Also 14 across is a mystery to me. thought the 16 across and 17 down were very clever. A tough start to the week…as others said not the usual 15 minute pen in of the answers…around 1 hour for me!
    1. 14ac duke = FIST note = A, around E(astern)

      9dn Trace of pigment = LAKE (lake is a pigment) TANG; some = ANY; thousand = K; in state = IA (Iowa)

  5. Much harder than the Monday norm. I was quite pleased to finish in 21 mins. I liked the crossing of Step(hen)son and Stevenson. The wordplay in 9D is as complex as any I can remember in the Times.

    Tom B.

  6. My first post, so it’s pity it’s a confession that I can’t understand 17, tho I have a feeling I’ve seen Stephenson and Stevenson in the same puzzle before. I’m sure I’ve seen the chicken. I found this quite difficult.
    1. 17dn: 16ac STE[p]SON losing its heart (the middle letter P) for VEN = venerable, the definition being “Scottish writer”

      PS Welcome!

      1. Thanks kurihan. It’s that format problem again: 16 in print = sixteen online. I didn’t think of that.
  7. Agreed – far from a Monday doddle! I got there in 45 mins in the end, though without completely understanding all the cryptic parsing. Thanks to kurihan and others for fully explaining LAKE TANGANYIKA at 9dn (I think I once knew but had forgotten that “lake” could be a pigment), and also for pointing out the very clever interlinked STEP[HEN]SON/STEVENSON wordplay at 16ac and 17dn. Re APEXES: I see that the Concise OED allows both “apexes” and “apices” as the plural form, so, I fear, the setter’s posterior is adequately covered and protected from a kicking!

    Michael H

  8. Agreed agreed agreed – I started last night and gave up on session 1 having confidently (and equally daftly adverbally) written in BREACH for 29 thinking it was A in BEACH. Slogged it out this morning, the pair of PIZZICATO and SUZERAINS being the last in.
  9. Very happy to finish in 24 minutes; especially given that I didn’t get a single answer until 20A. But then a quick solution for the anagram at 22 and with 25 popping out to give me X,W,Y I counted on a pangram (is it? I haven’t checked) which helped with adjutant/suzerain/pizzicato. A few were shoved in without any understanding of the word-play; esp. 6D naphthene, I guessed.

    Enjoyed but a lot of that is probably because I felt normally I would have struggled for twice as long.

    I’m sure I’ve seen something similar before, but for the surface 28A gets a COD nod.

  10. 23:40 After a week away with no crosswords, this was a tough reintroduction. Some very clever stuff, like the topical ousting of a “Simple Republican” (can’t imagine who they mean). A good vocab-stetcher, too, with things I only vaguely knew, like NAPHTHENE, SOI-DISANT and BRINDLED.

    Was I the only one to fall into the ‘resign’ trap in 1a, then struggle before finally untangling ‘untie/UNITE’ at 3d?

    Q-0, E-9, D-8 .. COD 3d

  11. 10:50 for this – an annoying puzzle as some of the unusual vocabulary came to mind quite easiliy, but I stumbled over the Steph/venson stuff and some other ones that should have been easy, like 21/29. Not quite a pangram, as there’s no Q except the one in “rescue”.
  12. Playing golf this morning the conversation turned to this site and the Times crossword (it’s all down to that TV show). I boldly asserted that the days of the Monday puzzle always being easy were sadly no longer with us. Boy am I glad that I did! The NW corner of this one is a bit of a brute.

    I filled in the whole RHS with only RESCUE sitting alone at 1A. Then the SW corner went in reluctantly, which left me looking at 9D and struggling until from the deepest recesses came LAKE=pigment. In the end my last in – and only guess – was SUZERAINS. About 45 minutes to solve.

  13. Stopped the clock at 9:30, which came as a surprise as I too was held up by the NW corner. Parsing 1D took longer than it should and that made 1A even harder to work out.
    I may be one of the few who didn’t struggle with SUZERAINS although SUZERAINTY is the word that was lurking helpfully in the back of my mind.
    My speed was no doubt helped by 5D almost answering itself via the enumeration, and I’ve put SOI-DISANT into a puzzle recently so that was a doddle.
    Odd about the missing Q spoiling a potential pangram as it could easily have been worked into 1A, but maybe the setter – like me recently – wasn’t on the lookout for a pangram anyway.

    Q-0 E-6 D-6 COD 28 (most convincing image of the bunch)

  14. Started last night, about 45 minutes or so, and had to return this morning to puzzle over the rest. Well over an hour all told. New to me: lake=pigment, soi-disant, brindled. I still don’t get 24’s wordplay. My last was 22, since it took me forever to see ‘is free’ to indicate anagram fodder. I’ll admit a slight American advantage at 2D, where ‘march king’ always suggests Sousa, so it went in first. Very deceptive and clever puzzle, and my hat’s off to those who got through this in anywhere near their usual time. Regards all.
    1. 24: Raised is equated with “lay” written upwards, i.e. “lay up” – which seems on reflection to be a bit wrong as “lay up” is present tense. Then “amateur army” is TA = Territorial Army (Brit. part-time soldiers, also called the “terriers”).

      1. Thanks kindly Peter, although as you say it appears a tad disjointed. My original problem was trying to equate ‘amateur army’ with ‘ATLAY’, which clearly got me nowhere.
        1. You beat me to it! Just as I was about to type up the same thing I lost my broadband connection. Dammit!
        2. Agree. However I already had the initial “Y”, and “Ukranian port” immediately brought to mind that grainy photograph of Churchill Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta conference, without needing the wordplay!
  15. I can’t understand this. Presumably the def is ‘Make one’, and in ‘untie’ (= free) you turn ‘it’ over. But where is ‘it’? Please can someone explain.
  16. Hoorah! I’ve made it! I v can explain a clue to someone else.
    Un”it”e. Reverse the “it” to get un”ti”e.
    I actually finished this crossword apart from not being able to spell Tanghan… Tanhngan..Tanganh…. Oh you know the one I mean.Thanks to all the experts who guided me through my basic learning process over the last few weeks.
    1. Susie, that’s a great picture. I shall have to respond in kind. We may have something other than crosswords to talk about on Sunday.
    2. Well done Susie. Please keep on contributing – we don’t have enough ladies on the site.
    3. I still don’t get it, Susie. You start with ‘untie’ and there isn’t an ‘it’ to turn over. You can’t say that turning ‘ti’ over is turning ‘it’ over.

      Anyway the day is long gone now and probably nobody will think about this ever again.

  17. A late entry! An hour and a half, finished eventually with my evening tea and biscuits, having managed around three quarters lunch time. Everything fair and above board, just very tough, and highly enjoyable! COD 5d.
  18. I learned a couple of new words in this one:

    15d SOI DISANT which – despite it being French – I managed to enter correctly from the anagrist despite being a great follower of The Franglais.

    2d SUZAREINS (sic) which I misguidedly took to be some kind of training tack for horses. As this relies on 2 homophones (dodgy – some say) it was not solvable unless you already knew the obscure word SUZERAINS. I shall try to remember it and hope that it is clued more fairly in future.

    There are 10 “easies” left out of the blog. At least one of these has caused some protracted discussion above. Here they are:

    11a Trainee barrister one may see through (5)
    PUPIL. I have no idea what the “barrister” is all about in this clue. I have underlined it with WTF? next to it.

    12a Blade cutting off head of animal with tusks (3)
    (B) OAR

    19a Making haste to be stylish (7)
    DASHING

    20a Copy former partners say – they’re the tops! (6)
    APEXES. Sounds like APE EXES – an alternative to APICES.

    25a Wool supplier going to and fro (3)
    EWE. The fact that EWE is a palindrome seems to be a source of endless wonder to crossword compilers.

    26a Tube from Victoria, or taxi? (5)
    A, OR TA. Nice hidden answer.

    27a Romanticist stirring up ladies’ ire (9)
    IDEALISER. Anagram of (ladies ire).

    3d Make one free, turning it over (5)
    UNITE. It means “make one” but free (untie) if you turn the “it” over.
    I think that’s how it works?

    7d Pleat Pueblo used regularly for part of jacket (5)
    p L e A t P u E b L o = LAPEL.

    23d Onward direction of river (5)
    FORTH. As in “Go forth and multiply”.

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