Times 28,151: My 13dn is HELLraison

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This was quick for a Friday but upon parsing I see it was mostly because the answers were too darn biffable: 10ac, 25ac, 4dn for instance all going straight in before I’d needed to appreciate their subtleties fully. The SE corner gave me by far the most pause, with 13dn being a good non-obvious anagram, 21dn being slightly lateral, and 29ac throwing me for a minute-long loop as recounted below. Plus I think 14dn is my COD with its cryptic contortions fully justified by the model lift-and-separate requirement of “horse’s stall”.

In short, nice one setter, and I shall even for forgive you for the inclusion of motorways and multiple rugger references, which would dampen my enthusiasm if encountered in a quiz, but never mind, they would almost certainly make topicaltim‘s day so swings and roundabouts. (The Times-for-the-Times Quizzing Juggernaut rolls on, incidentally: we seem to have managed to avoid relegation from Division 1 this season, much to all of our surprise!)

Definitions underlined, (ABC)* indicating anagram of ABC, {} deletions and [] other indicators.

Across
1 Welsh runner on return put away stuff (7)
TAFFETA – TAFF [Welsh runner = something that runs = river] + reversed ATE [put away]
5 Clubs twice invested in shabby old kit for assembly (7)
MECCANO – C C “invested” in MEAN O(ld). FOI, with great nostalgia
9 Place I quit to make money abroad (3)
LEU – L{i}EU. Romanian currency, not to be confused with the Bulgarian lev or the Albanian lek
10 Ignorant Oscar is abandoning state for sea (3-8)
ILL-INFORMED – ILLIN{o}{is} + FOR MED(iterranean)
11 Mediocre temp initially standing in for female domestic (8)
INTERIOR – IN{f->T}ERIOR
12 Addict tours centrepiece of church, one attracting lots of interest (6)
USURER – USER “tours” {ch}UR{ch}. That is monetary interest, not curiosity
15 Purchase beef after reduction (4)
GRIP – GRIP{e}
16 Books in popular eastern landing place showing discrepancy (10)
INEQUALITY – LIT(erature) in IN E(astern) QUAY
18 Refurbish chapel a bit in established Order (10)
ALPHABETIC – (CHAPEL A BIT*)
19 Emphatic type dismissed, caught (4)
BOLD – homophone of BOWLED. That’s type as in typeface
22 Hurried to complete minutes in no particular order (6)
RANDOM – RAN DO M [hurried | to complete | minutes]
23 It strains fellow traveller visiting satellite perhaps (8)
COLANDER – or CO-LANDER (on the moon?)
25 Poster impresses one Scottish golf club perhaps (7,4)
PLAYING CARD – PLACARD “impresses” YIN G(olf)
27 Tips of plant, Chinese camellia? (3)
TEA – {plan}T {chines}E {camelli}A, &lit
28 Appear expert on white horses? (7)
SURFACE – or SURF ACE
29 Significant space in medical speciality (7)
EMINENT – EM IN E.N.T. I wasted a lot of my solving time trying to work out which of VIDE or MINE was more likely to mean “space” before the penny smacked me in the chops
Down
1 Bank job making an impact (7)
TELLING – double def
2 Writer‘s source? A stylish prison (8,3)
FOUNTAIN PEN – FOUNT [source] + A + IN [stylish] + PEN(itentiary). Thanks Jeremy for stopping me wondering aloud why a penitentiary was necessarily more stylish than a prison
3 One leaving country before fighter’s let in (6)
EMIGRE – ERE with MiG let in
4 Versatile player‘s ball game without wings (3-7)
ALL-ROUNDER – {b}ALL ROUNDER{s}
5 A person of habit, male running kilometres (4)
MONK – M ON K [male | running | kilometres]. A person dressed in a habit, ofc
6 Peeved group of lawyers that joins supporters on pitch (8)
CROSSBAR – CROSS BAR [peeved | lawyers]. The supporters are the goalposts
7 Target section of north-south artery (3)
AIM – I think this is just a reference to A1(M) motorway sections, though I refuse to engage with motorway-based quiz questions and so I must do the same for crossword clues
8 Tidy Berliner article found in airport (7)
ORDERLY – DER found in (Paris) Orly
13 Does trainer broadcast a topic in metaphysics? (6,5)
RAISON DETRE – (DOES TRAINER*)
14 “Very old Tom” superseding name in horse’s stall? (10)
EQUIVOCATE – EQUI{n->V O CAT}E
17 Original claim a March girl’s put in for pottery (8)
MAJOLICA – (CLAIM*) with A JO (March from Little Women) put in
18 A forward’s hogging ball? That’s concerning (7)
APROPOS – A PROP’S “hogging” O
20 Quiet commissionaire misses nothing, given time (7)
DORMANT – DO{o}RMAN + T(ime)
21 Indian figurehead‘s three letters in a row (6)
GANDHI – G & H I
24 Round some work up, nasty sort (4)
OGRE – O + reversed ERG
26 Look — one’s taken in by a conjuror ultimately (3)
AIR – I “taken in” by A {conjuro}R

86 comments on “Times 28,151: My 13dn is HELLraison”

  1. are my forays into Friday’s 15×15, being faint of heart as I am.

    Enjoyed this though, and made a decent enough fist of it until stalling a bit on the last couple. PLAYING CARD took an alpha trawl all the way to L and then to Y — very very dim. Alpha trawl also for INTERIOR, again, not a difficult clue.

    MAJOLICA from watching antiques roadshow, not really my taste, but helpful, as JO March was NHO. I did wonder about TAFFETA = stuff.

    27:25

  2. Most enjoyable.

    Like Verlaine I found the South East the trickiest area with GANDHI (COD) and EMINENT holding out for some time. At least I won’t need to struggle when spelling the former in future.

    Picasso had a thing about Ma Jolie and MAJOLICA which helped, as did recently having seeing the Little Women film.

    According to the BBC, FOUNTAIN PEN sales are on the rise.

    Thanks to Verlaine and the setter.

    1. How else would you annotate your vinyl record collection except with a fountain pen? The reactionary old ways are the best.
      1. I was told that a gentleman should always use a fountain pen to sign his name, but I find it irritates the hell out of delivery people with their little electronic receipt pads.
  3. Too many biffs here — FOUNTAIN PEN (simply thought FOUNTAIN instead of FOUNT for source); ILL-INFORMED (got the sea bit); EMINENT (shrugged about space = MINE which turned out to be a load of cods anyway)

    LEU — bit of a punt though thought I’d seen it before somewhere — PLACE = lieu didn’t occur to me.

    PLAYING CARD took ages to spot as I’d thought the second word might be IRON — changed only when I thought of The Big Yin and saw exactly what else a ‘club’ is.

    MAJOLICA — saw the anag and the March girl very quickly. Just didn’t know that it was china.

    I didn’t really get the topic in metaphysics clue but see it now — not my favourite.

  4. 18.22. I made a decent fist of this, aided no doubt by the relatively high biff-ability of several answers as mentioned by the blogger. This led to a tendency to identify the solution from definition then work back to crack the parsing, with only playing card eluding my parsing while solving. So a nice puzzle but overall it gave me a less satisfying solving experience than when you crack the clue by approaching it simultaneously from the two ends of word play and definition.
  5. ….if you have a beef with someone’s argument, you might gainsay it — which buggered up 15A despite missing out on any typos. Took me 3 alpha trawls to see my LOI, and I was damnably slow all round.

    FOI TAFFETA
    LOI BOLD
    COD EQUIVOCATE
    TIME 14:00 with one error.

  6. About 45 minutes, but like many above I was stuffed by 17d. Very poor clue in a daily cryptic in my opinion. Pick a pretty obscure word with two different spellings, clue it with an insert in a jumble of CLAIM, all but one of the letters of which are unchecked, giving various possibilities if you don’t know the word. I don’t why the Times cryptic is so wedded to Little Women either. Only a setter who wants to trip solvers up at the finishing line sets a clue like that.
    1. There was a time decades ago when the crossword seemed to be wedded to Barchester Towers, about which I know next to nothing. Little Women does seem to come up a lot but I’ve never read it.
    2. If you haven’t read Little Women (as I’m sure most of us actually haven’t) SURELY you must at least have run across a screen adaptation. There was a Greta Gerwig one recently that did good business I believe…
  7. Crawled to a finish in 40 minutes, sleepy after a muddy game of golf, only to find I had one wrong – plumped for EVIDENT for 29a. Also had Mahatma spelt GHANDI for a while which slowed down the SE corner muchly. Thanks V for explaining 29a and the YIN Scottish thing.
      1. Pip, every two or three days I am logged out by LJ. Never figured out how to solve it.
  8. 14:24 late this afternoon. A good time for me for a Friday, although I see the SNITCH is at the top end of “moderate” right now, so perhaps gentler fare than normal for the final working day of the week.
    As yesterday, experienced a sluggish start and then suddenly picked up speed. Solving 16 ac “inequality”, once I’d decided that the landing place in question could be “quay”, then opened up the SE corner.
    Have to confess that I got 29 ac “eminent” for the wrong reasons, having convinced myself that “mine” could mean space , obviously thinking of an open-cast mine. Anyway thanks to V for the illumination.
    I enjoyed many of the clues during the process of solving and then savouring them some more during a re-read after completion — “Ill informed”, “bold”, “playing card” and “gandhi” to mention but a few.
    Thanks to V as ever for the informative blog and to setter for rounding off what has been an enjoyable week of puzzling.
  9. BOLD was very hard, because cricket. And then there was the “forward” in APROPOS.
    SURFACE was one of my last in, and very cool.
    Today’s new word discovered thru wordplay: MAJOLICA.
    I’d pick EQUIVOCATE as my COD too, unequivocally.

    Edited at 2021-12-03 08:31 pm (UTC)

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