Times Cryptic No 27702 – Saturday, 27 June 2020. The Good Place.

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For me, this puzzle was in the Good Place. No clue I couldn’t (eventually) solve, few answers if any that could be written in and justified at first glance. There were answers beyond my vocabulary like 12 ac, and others beyond my knowledge like 5ac and 22dn, but all were crackable one way or the other. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Notes for newcomers: The Times offers prizes for Saturday Cryptic Crosswords. This blog is posted a week later, after the competition closes. So, please don’t comment here on the current Saturday Cryptic.

Clues are blue, with definitions underlined. Deletions are in {curly brackets}.

Across
1 Difficult screening start of horror film (3,5)
THE STING – TESTING ‘screening’ H. No, just a film, not of the horror genre.
5 Occult specialist withdrawing here in Rome (6)
ORPHIC – PRO backwards (‘withdrawing’), HIC (Latin for ‘here’). I realised Orpheus must have had links to the Underworld, by reference to the Offenbach opera; but I couldn’t have said he had occult leanings.
9 Link breaking on birthday (8)
FORTIETH – TIE ‘breaking’ FORTH. ‘Go forth’ might be just a grand way of saying ‘go on’, I suppose, but it doesn’t seem like a perfect match.
10 Drive back from Mumbai in journeys westward (6)
SPIRIT – I from {Mumba}I in TRIPS ‘westward’.
12 Winter time basically represented in iambic pentameter? (12)
DECASYLLABIC – DEC (December, or winter time), then an anagram (‘represented’) of BASICALLY. I puzzled over what the first three letters of the answer should be, until I read the clue again!
15 Cooler part of UK for Briton once (5)
ICENI – ICE, N.I. (Northern Ireland).
16 Choose casual look for carpet (5,4)
DRESS DOWN – double definition. Easiest clue of the day, I thought.
18 Grave details conveyed by this teacher’s voice (9)
HEADSTONE – HEAD’S (teacher’s), TONE. My first thought, TOMBSTONE, went nowhere of course.
19 Pull in net (5)
CLEAR – double definition again. Not as obvious as 16ac; I had to think about whether ‘clear’ means ‘pull in’, but it works in the sense of ‘take-home pay’..
20 Wife associated with Avon hair dye rejected a new hat fashion (4,8)
ANNE HATHAWAY – HENNA backwards (‘rejected’), A (literal in the clue), anagram (‘new’) of HAT, WAY (fashion).
24 I live by inlet in peninsula (6)
IBERIA – I, BE, RIA. Yes, I looked it up for the blog: a ria is indeed an inlet.
25 One is found in church, perhaps (8)
MINISTER – I (one) in MINSTER. Very cute.
26 Nearly go out in Germany’s capital, say (6)
GUTTER – G{ermany}, UTTER. What candles do.
27 Registered where the needle goes (2,6)
ON RECORD – clever double definition.

Down
1 Swell reaching great volume? (4)
TOFF – TO (reaching), FF (very loud).
2 Noble and tragic figure with head lowered (4)
EARL – LEAR, with the L ‘lowered’ to the end of this down answer.
3 Where Parisians stroll in leisure time, half drunk (9)
TUILERIES – anagram (‘drunk’) of LEISURE TI{me}. Another of my knowledge gaps – I didn’t know it was a public park.
4 Brass tacks and polish quickly put away in raised floor (4,3,5)
NUTS AND BOLTS – SAND (polish) and BOLT (quickly put away), in STUN backwards (‘raised’).
6 Snub pariah the wrong way (5)
REPEL – LEPER backwards.
7 E.g. Louis Armstrong, a hero in the main (10)
HORNBLOWER – Mr. Midshipman Hornblower was a novel by C.S.Forester.
8 Urban area cryptically suggesting it? (4,6)
CITY CENTRE – the idea is that if you look at the middle of cITy, you can see that ‘city centre’ might be a clue for IT.
11 A single amount of DNA that I’m allotted? (2,10)
MY GENERATION – my gene ration would be the 23 chromosome pairs I inherit from my parents. My Generation was a signature song by rock band The Who. In my case, too late to hope I die before I get old!
13 Wrongly catching the setter’s back, removing coat (10)
MISHEARING – I’M backwards, then SHEARING (removing the coat of a sheep, say).
14 Tinned meat, diced, being kept in the can (10)
DETAINMENT – anagram (‘diced’) of TINNED MEAT.
17 Lefty hasn’t succeeded, English party stalwart (9)
SOCIALITE – SOCIALI{s}T without S (succeeded), then E (English). Nice misdirection in the definition.
21 Poet using some cliché in expression (5)
HEINE – hidden answer. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was a German poet.
22 Uncovered base ingredient in perfume (4)
OTTO – {b}OTTO{m}. Perfume ingredients is never going to be my specialty subject!
23 Jog or run through school (4)
PROD – R in POD.

17 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27702 – Saturday, 27 June 2020. The Good Place.”

  1. ….the comfy chair !”

    My problems on this puzzle were largely caused by 25A, where I confidently entered “cardinal” into the pristine white cells, “one” being cardinal rather than ordinal, and that dignitary being found in church. Fortunately, I knew OTTO, and quickly tapped in PROD. Even so, it still took some time to correctly replace the bad biff with MINISTER.

    I started by entering THE at 1A but needed checkers, hence my FOI. Even with the first four Down clues in, I still couldn’t crack 9A, which needed a three minute alpha-trawl at the end.

    DNK ORPHIC, and only parsed ANNE HATHAWAY afterwards.

    FOI TOFF
    LOI FORTIETH
    COD MY GENERATION
    TIME 22:35

  2. Slow but steady, as I recall. Biffed DECASYLLABIC–Bruce, I think you need to extend the underline to include ‘in’. Biffed ANNE HATHAWAY–I’ve marked the clue as ‘QC’–but saw the wordplay once I typed it in. I never did see how ‘raised floor’ works in 4d. Fortunately, we’ve had OTTO a few times, and RIA shows up often in the NYT. Orpheus may not have had occult leanings, but Orphism evidently did.
    1. Interesting. I’m not sure I see why the “in” needs to be underlined. Perhaps it depends how you read it?
  3. LOI FORTIETH, then it came up a few days later clued as “ruby” and didn’t cause a holdup. Happy to spell TUILERIES correctly; certainly wouldn’t have without the checkers.
    25’39”
  4. Arrived home in 39 minutes after changing 8dn from TOWN CENTRE to CITY CENTRE.

    FOI 21dn HEINE

    LOI 1dn TOFF

    COD 12ac DECASYLLABIC

    WOD 22dn OTTO as per ATTAR etc.

    I wonder how Mr. Riddlecome is today?

  6. 47 minutes with LOI the unheard-of palindromic perfume ingredient. A very enjoyable puzzle. COD to ORPHIC for reminding me of the hic haec hoc declension. I didn’t stutter at at all getting 11d and knew what an iambic pentameter was sufficiently well to multiply five by two. So I don’t quite know where the time went, but go it did, Thank you Bruce and setter.
  7. Very nice effort this. Good to be reminded of CS Forester. He wrote a dozen or so Hornblower books, all of them absolutely top class. Forester really knew his stuff, vastly better than that O’Brian chappie.
    He wrote The African Queen, as well
  8. I agree, Bruce, this was enjoyable. My notes say “fun”, although I had never heard of ORPHIC.
    HORNBLOWER was just edged out by MY GENERATION in the COD Stakes, in my opinion.
  9. Pushed to 20+ minutes with most of the clues needing more than a passing thought.
    THE STING went in straight off the bat. Ridiculous that it’s 47 (47!) years old. It still plays well, as does MY GENERATION. The last HORNBLOWER was published in 1967. Am I getting old, or what?
  10. I was stretched almost to the hour by this puzzle. Like Phil I had THE for 1a long before I was able to deduce STING. My attempt at spelling TUILERIES prevented me from getting FORTIETH, as I’d put the L before the I, so I eventually resorted to a word finder, and then corrected 3d. Somehow remembered OTTO from a previous puzzle. I took HEINE on trust. Like Bruce, I had to think for a while about the first 3 letters of DECASYLLABIC. ORPHIC took a while to solve, although I did have the HIC bit of ot early on. I confess to checking whether there was such a word. 57:33. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  11. 20:01. FORTIETH LOI. I was looking for a word that might mean umbilical cord. I took FORTH = on as in “from this day on”. NHO ORPHIC. Some nice clues. I liked the “gene ration” and GUTTER, but my favourite was TUILERIES for the leisure time-drinking Parisians.
  12. A day trip to Sheffield and back last Saturday so I was looking at this on and off when not driving. I’m glad I had lots of time as it stretched me to my limit, and beyond.
    Was pleased to get almost all apart from ORPHIC. Had no idea how to get this unknown word.
    I had METAsyllabic at 12a which was my only other error. Knew OTTO from puzzles. COD to TUILERIES.
    Heinrich Heine lived in Craven Street, London for a time; near The Ship and Shovell.
    David
    1. I’ve just read that technically it should be The Ship and The Shovell as they are two entities across an alley. It’s as well I read that, as I was thinking ‘Ship’ must have been a misprint of something else.
  13. 15:06. Really nice puzzle I thought.
    I read and loved the Hornblower books when I was a boy. None of my kids have: I might buy the first one for my youngest. We did expose the kids to THE STING a year or two ago and they loved it.
    I agree with Kevin that you need ‘in’ as part of the definition of DECASYLLABIC.

    Edited at 2020-07-04 10:27 am (UTC)

  14. DNF. I found this hard, particularly the NW with fortieth, toff and Tuileries and took over an hour only to find I have a pink square at IberiS. Stupid typo. I couldn’t’ve told you what a ria was beforehand but the definition was clear. Decasyllabic and my g-g-g-g-generation were my favourites.
  15. I wasted ages at 9a looking for a technical word in obstetrics – another word for the umbilical cord maybe. But it didn’t seem a very good clue even after the penny had dropped. 40 minutes. Ann

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