Should have been 8’30” but ended up at 9’30” as I spent a full minute trying to figure out the last three letters of 22 Across. A very straightforward puzzle with a lot of answers written in with barely a glance at the definition. Nevertheless, the wordplay is quite nice, and I appreciate the use of plurals not ending in ‘s’ (and vice versa).
Across
| 1 | Shy away on the subject of company I left (6) |
| RECOIL – RE (“on the subject of”) + CO (“company”) + I + L (“left”) | |
| 4 | Caught a number of ladies dancing like German shepherds? (6) |
|
CANINE – C (“caught”) + A + NINE A reference to ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. The question mark is part of the definition and signifies ‘for example’. |
|
| 8 | Initially, carpet fitter [looking for] a charlady? (7) |
|
CLEANER – first letter of CARPET + LEANER Same with the question mark here. |
|
| 10 | What’s used by forger: some German villain (5) |
|
ANVIL – letters in GERMAN VILLAIN Wouldn’t this need a question mark? |
|
| 11 | What we have to protect quick / fixes (5) |
|
NAILS – double definition ‘Quick’ is the skin under fingernails or toenails. |
|
| 12 | Warriors [from] Asia, drunk with rum (7) |
| SAMURAI – ASIA anagrammed with RUM | |
| 13 | A boxing match features command to turn round (5,4) |
| ABOUT FACE – A + BOUT + FACE | |
| 17 | Billiard player needs this signal before dance (3,4) |
| CUE BALL – CUE + BALL | |
| 19 | Instrument in lorry to set about a check (5) |
|
TACHO – TO around A + CH (“check”) Wouldn’t this need a question mark? Etc. Short for ‘tachometer’. |
|
| 20 | US agents grabbing Catholic roughly (5) |
| CIRCA – C.I.A. around RC (“Catholic”) | |
| 21 | One collects trash — and smut, unusually (7) |
| DUSTMAN – AND SMUT anagrammed | |
| 22 | Show cheat device for regulating temperature (6) |
| AIRCON – AIR + CON | |
| 23 | Extremes of emotion left expert [in] bind (6) |
| ENLACE – first and last letters of EMOTION + L (“left”) + ACE |
Down
| 1 | French tragedian [in] a nicer translation (6) |
|
RACINE – A NICER anagrammed Thanks to kevingregg for the catch. |
|
| 2 | Ministerial oversight? (8,5) |
| CLERICAL ERROR – cheeky &-lit-ish definition | |
| 3 | Detachment from delegation escorting French playwright (7) |
|
IONESCO – letters in DELEGATION ESCORTING Didn’t figure this one out until writing the blog! |
|
| 5 | Scare in the manner of resident magistrate (5) |
| ALARM – A LA + RM (“resident magistrate”) | |
| 6 | One of four in “Sunday best” turned up before interval (8,5) |
|
INVERTED COMMA – INVERTED + COMMA Didn’t know ‘comma’ for ‘interval’ but apparently it’s a term in music? Probably what I call a ‘breath mark’. |
|
| 7 | Cake [of] rice Al cut up (6) |
| ECLAIR – RICE with AL put inside, all reversed | |
| 9 | Large seat in crimson given a new home? (9) |
|
RESETTLED – SETTLE in RED Didn’t know the term for the seat. |
|
| 14 | Prejudiced, dismissing head craftsman (7) |
| ARTISAN – PARTISAN without the first letter | |
| 15 | A cactus chopped in half, one by a shrub (6) |
| ACACIA – A + first half of CACTUS + I + A | |
| 16 | One lent money, behold, a necessity, almost (6) |
| LOANEE – LO + A + NEED with all but the last letter | |
| 18 | Payload missing odd parts on second mission (5) |
| ALAMO – even numbered letters of PAYLOAD + MO (“second”) |
EDIT: Comments on some of the clues
Let’s dig in!
Across
4 Caught a number of ladies dancing like German shepherds? (6)
One thing you can usually count on with Quickies is that the wordplay is much more bald. (With the 15×15 puzzles, the setters do whatever they can to fool you into the wrong interpretation of wordplay indicators.) Use this to your advantage!
So, for example, when you see ‘caught’ as the first word, it might be the definition, but most likely it indicates that C is the first letter of the answer. Write down ‘C’. Put it on the page so your mind starts searching for answers.
Another thing you can count on with Times puzzles (Quickies or 15x15s) is that every word has a meaning. Therefore the word ‘a’ undoubtedly means A. So write it down!
Now, I could be wrong. The answer could be ‘caught’, or ‘a’ could really be part of ‘a number’ which could clue TWO for all I know. But most likely, especially in a Quickie, these words indicate the little pieces we’ll use to put a word together.
If CA _ _ _ _ is the answer, then the definition has something to do with German shepherds. Now’s the time to let the mind muse on words relating to dogs that begin with CA. If you think of CANINE, you can be sure it’s right, because NINE is a number and we’ve yet to decode the part of the clue that refers to ‘number’.
Also, ‘number’ can indicate N, which might help you stumble into the answer.
If you didn’t think of CANINE, then work on some of the crossing clues.
Of course, ‘dancing’ could indicate an anagram, but none of the adjacent words have the right number of letters, so just cross out that possibility.
11 What we have to protect quick fixes (5)
I didn’t get what was going on with this one until writing the blog. I had some crossing letters, and was parsing it maybe as “What we have to protect / quick fixes”, and was thinking of NAILS as just something we use to protect ourselves. Only in writing the blog, and forcing myself to try to account for every word, did I realize how to parse the clue.
12 Warriors from Asia, drunk with rum (7)
Of course I can’t help if the word SAMURAI is obscure to you. I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the United States, and samurais were very popular in TV and in video games. Also, I have a weird brain that somehow recognizes RACINE and IONESCO without having read a word either of them wrote. Very very helpful for doing crossword puzzles.
Where I can help is that you should absolutely absolutely absolutely know that the answer here is an anagram of ASIA+RUM. In a 15×15, the wordplay would be more subtle, but with a Quickie, you should feel 100% confident that the answer here is a word meaning ‘warriors’, and that the wordplay is an anagram of these letters. If you didn’t catch that, we gotta go back to basics! (Let me know, and I can try to help.)
20 US agents grabbing Catholic roughly (5)
As before, ‘roughly’ could indicate an anagram, but since ‘Catholic’ doesn’t have the right number of letters, throw that idea straight out.
‘US agents’ is invariably CIA, which is a big hint. Maybe it could be FEDS or something but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that. So, with a five-letter clue this is a huge hint, as the answer is either:
C _ _ IA or CI _ _ A ,
because ‘grabbing’ also will 100% in a Quickie indicate putting a word inside another. So you should definitely be writing C _ _ _ A into the grid.
This means that the answer is ‘roughly’, and if you don’t know the word CIRCA, you ought to learn it, because using ‘about’, ‘around’, ‘roughly’, etc to indicate C or CA (abbreviations for ‘circa’) is a Cryptic Crossword chestnut.
Alternatively, you might have know that RC is an abbreviation for (Roman) Catholic, although I would imagine this isn’t commonly used, even in the UK.
22 Show cheat device for regulating temperature (6)
Many solvers, myself included, mentioned that this was our last answer in. I’ve never heard of AIRCON and that’s not a term in the US as far as I know.
The word ‘cheat’ is not part of the definition, because ‘show cheat’ is not a thing, and neither is ‘cheat device for regulating temperature’. Therefore the definition is either ‘show’ or ‘device for regulating temperature’, and this latter surely has to be it. If the answer was 10 letters we could just slam in THERMOSTAT.
Okay, so we have a very reasonable guess for the definition. Therefore the wordplay must be “show cheat”, which 100% in a Quickie has to be a charades-style cluing where the answer is a synonym for ‘show’ + a synonym for ‘cheat’.
If you have crossing clues as I did, you might have A _ R at the start, and ‘show’ = AIR is very common in these puzzles. Indeed, the word AIR is very very very common in cryptics, so you should be on guard for it. (It took me years to finally catch on to ‘key’ = ALT, but we have to get these things if we want to improve!)
I had AIR _ O _ and was contemplating AIRBOX (still thinking of ‘thermostat’), and wondering if BOX was a synonym for ’cheat’. Finally I threw that out and just started thinking of synonyms of ‘cheat’. CON and DO are the biggest ones I think you’ll see in cryptics and you should be on guard for both.
As I said, I’d never heard of AIRCON but it’s clearly a shortening of ‘air conditioning’.
23 Extremes of emotion left expert in bind (6)
ENLACE is not super common., but one thing you develop a taste for in cryptics is getting a sense of whether something is a word. (‘En’ is a prefix that can be put on a verb that achieves a change in state.) This tip won’t work for Mephisto puzzles, or monthly specials, or even for many 15x15s, but with Quickies it’s definitely a skill to use.
But again, with Quickies, you can count on the wordplay 100%. ‘Extremes of emotion’ cannot mean anything but EN, that is, the first and last letters of the word ‘enlace’. The word ‘left’ cannot mean anything in this context but L or PORT. If ENPORT was a word, or ‘expert in bind’ could possibly be the definition, we’d be in a bind indeed! But those don’t pass muster.
So we have ENL _ _ _ and what remains is ‘expert’ and the definition is ‘bind’. ‘Expert’ = ACE is very common and one to put in your journal of common short words and abbreviations.
The moral of the story is: wordplay wordplay wordplay.
Down
2 Ministerial oversight? (8.5)
Not much to say about this one. You’ll need some checkers, and you’ll need to know the expression. Also it’s important to recognize that, given the question mark and the number of words, this is likely a cheeky definition. I had C _ E _ I _ A _ and thinking of ‘ministerial’ made me think of CLERICAL, but still I didn’t get the joke until I started writing it in.
3 Detachment from delegation escorting French playwright (7)
I got this one from crossing letters (even though I don’t know a thing about IONESCO other than I’ve seen his name before), so I won’t be of much help. I didn’t even realize this was a hidden word clue.
But here’s what I’ll say. If you’re struggling with Quickies, start focusing on improving your recognition of hidden words and anagrams. Both of these put the letters for the answer right in front of you, and if you can get better at these you’ll get more footholds into puzzles.
6 One of four in “Sunday best” turned up before interval (8,5)
Again a hard one to give advice for. Clues about grammatical terms (‘a’ for INDEFINITE ARTICLE or ‘went, for example’ for VERB) or punctuation are tricky, as they are super super meta. But when you see ‘one of four’, you’ve gotta start thinking, especially in a Quickie, “Okay, what are there four of?”. The only thing is the punctuation mark.
Unfortunately, ‘interval’ for COMMA is super vague, so if you don’t know the term, you’re gonna have trouble here.
9 Large seat in crimson given a new home? (9)
I don’t know what problem you had here, but it is absolutely crucial to know that in a Quickie puzzle, ‘crimson’ = RED, and the definition is ‘given a new home’, which means that the answer has to be:
RE _ _ _ _ _ ED
because ‘in’ must mean that we’re putting ‘large seat’ inside RED, and ‘given a new home’ 100% means that the answer is RE+(past tense verb). Being on the lookout for RE+(verb) definitions is definitely part of any crossword solvers bag of tricks (even US-style crosswords).
So, did you get that far? If you got that far and you still didn’t get the answer, pat yourself on the back. You’re doing well! If you didn’t, take note of these wordplay aspects I take for granted, and get them in your system!
14 Prejudiced, dismissing head craftsman (7)
Hard to get without checkers, but hopefully you know that the answer means ‘craftsman’, and is obtained by removing the first letter of a word meaning ‘prejudiced’.
15 A cactus chopped in half, one by a shrub
You will never see ‘chopped in half’ in a 15×15. So as a solver of quickies, you must latch on to this hint and realize that ‘cactus chopped in half’ must give CAC or TUS. This means that the first ‘a’ must mean A, so the answer is either ACAC _ _ or ATUS _ _ . Did you get that far?
The next words are ‘one by a’, and in a Quickie, ‘one’ must mean I, and ‘a’ must mean A. So the answer is ACACIA or ATUSIA, and if you got that far and needed to look up both in a dictionary, again, pat yourself on the back because you’re doing great!
This clue is very different from 14 Down, which requires you to pluck 7- and 8-letter words out of your mind with only a one-word synonym to help. There isn’t a single part of the wordplay in 15 Down which requires you to know the definition of any word. It is all wordplay, and if you weren’t aware of that, ask yourself how you got off track.
16 One lent money, behold, a necessity, almost (6)
When you see ‘almost’ in a Quickie, you 100% can conclude that ‘necessity, almost’ means a synonym for ’necessity’ minus the last letter. You gotta lock into that right away.
That means the definition must be ‘one lent money’, and note that this can never ever ever in a crossword mean LOANER, because definitions are always given in the present tense (“one who lends money”) unless the past tense is part of the definition. That’s a convention of crossword puzzles and if you didn’t know it, now you do!
So, it must mean ‘one who has been lent money’, which is surely crossword-ese for something ending in -EE.
But I’d start with ‘behold’, which in a Quickie is 100% going to be LO. It’s archaic but you gotta know it. Then of course ‘a’ must be A, so we have LOA _ _ _ , and now we’re well on our way.
I don’t think this would be allowed in US-style puzzles because LOANEE and ‘lent’ share a word root.
18 Payload missing odd parts on second mission (5)
If you didn’t immediately recognize this as a hidden letters clue, you gotta up your game! When you see ‘every other part’ or ‘missing odd parts’, go straight to the word and write down what you get: pAyLoAd -> ALA _ _ .
What’s left is ‘on second mission’. Could the answer be ‘second mission’? Then ‘on’ could be ON or RE. Could the answer be ALARE? ALAON?
Alternatively, the missing two letters could come from ‘second’, and in a Quickie, ‘second’ will always be S or MO (for ‘moment’). If you don’t know these, learn them!
Today, no chance . 1945 Hrs and still eight unanswered. So I look up this blog. Still non the wiser on four of them even having read the explanations. Hey ho – there’s always tomorrow. I do get a lot of pleasure doing these by the way.
However, if someone can complete this in 4 mins 02 seconds I would not bother. It take me that long to read the clues!
He is a blogger on this site, and came in second to Magoo at the 2017 Times championship, so his time is real.
How does he do it? I wouldn’t know.
If you need more help, call out some clue numbers.
Two unknown Frenchmen needed checking before writing in.
Very good though all round
Thanks all
John George
Across
4 Caught a number of ladies dancing like German shepherds? (6)
One thing you can usually count on with Quickies is that the wordplay is much more bald. (With the 15×15 puzzles, the setters do whatever they can to fool you into the wrong interpretation of wordplay indicators.) Use this to your advantage!
So, for example, when you see ‘caught’ as the first word, it might be the definition, but most likely it indicates that C is the first letter of the answer. Write down ‘C’. Put it on the page so your mind starts searching for answers.
Another thing you can count on with Times puzzles (Quickies or 15x15s) is that every word has a meaning. Therefore the word ‘a’ undoubtedly means A. So write it down!
Now, I could be wrong. The answer could be ‘caught’, or ‘a’ could really be part of ‘a number’ which could clue TWO for all I know. But most likely, especially in a Quickie, these words indicate the little pieces we’ll use to put a word together.
If CA _ _ _ _ is the answer, then the definition has something to do with German shepherds. Now’s the time to let the mind muse on words relating to dogs that begin with CA. If you think of CANINE, you can be sure it’s right, because NINE is a number and we’ve yet to decode the part of the clue that refers to ‘number’.
Also, ‘number’ can indicate N, which might help you stumble into the answer.
If you didn’t think of CANINE, then work on some of the crossing clues.
Of course, ‘dancing’ could indicate an anagram, but none of the adjacent words have the right number of letters, so just cross out that possibility.
11 What we have to protect quick fixes (5)
I didn’t get what was going on with this one until writing the blog. I had some crossing letters, and was parsing it maybe as “What we have to protect / quick fixes”, and was thinking of NAILS as just something we use to protect ourselves. Only in writing the blog, and forcing myself to try to account for every word, did I realize how to parse the clue.
12 Warriors from Asia, drunk with rum (7)
Of course I can’t help if the word SAMURAI is obscure to you. I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the United States, and samurais were very popular in TV and in video games. Also, I have a weird brain that somehow recognizes RACINE and IONESCO without having read a word either of them wrote. Very very helpful for doing crossword puzzles.
Where I can help is that you should absolutely absolutely absolutely know that the answer here is an anagram of ASIA+RUM. In a 15×15, the wordplay would be more subtle, but with a Quickie, you should feel 100% confident that the answer here is a word meaning ‘warriors’, and that the wordplay is an anagram of these letters. If you didn’t catch that, we gotta go back to basics! (Let me know, and I can try to help.)
As before, ‘roughly’ could indicate an anagram, but since ‘Catholic’ doesn’t have the right number of letters, throw that idea straight out.
‘US agents’ is invariably CIA, which is a big hint. Maybe it could be FEDS or something but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that. So, with a five-letter clue this is a huge hint, as the answer is either:
C _ _ IA or CI _ _ A ,
because ‘grabbing’ also will 100% in a Quickie indicate putting a word inside another. So you should definitely be writing C _ _ _ A into the grid.
This means that the answer is ‘roughly’, and if you don’t know the word CIRCA, you ought to learn it, because using ‘about’, ‘around’, ‘roughly’, etc to indicate C or CA (abbreviations for ‘circa’) is a Cryptic Crossword chestnut.
Alternatively, you might have know that RC is an abbreviation for (Roman) Catholic, although I would imagine this isn’t commonly used, even in the UK.
22 Show cheat device for regulating temperature (6)
Many solvers, myself included, mentioned that this was our last answer in. I’ve never heard of AIRCON and that’s not a term in the US as far as I know.
The word ‘cheat’ is not part of the definition, because ‘show cheat’ is not a thing, and neither is ‘cheat device for regulating temperature’. Therefore the definition is either ‘show’ or ‘device for regulating temperature’, and this latter surely has to be it. If the answer was 10 letters we could just slam in THERMOSTAT.
Okay, so we have a very reasonable guess for the definition. Therefore the wordplay must be “show cheat”, which 100% in a Quickie has to be a charades-style cluing where the answer is a synonym for ‘show’ + a synonym for ‘cheat’.
If you have crossing clues as I did, you might have A _ R at the start, and ‘show’ = AIR is very common in these puzzles. Indeed, the word AIR is very very very common in cryptics, so you should be on guard for it. (It took me years to finally catch on to ‘key’ = ALT, but we have to get these things if we want to improve!)
I had AIR _ O _ and was contemplating AIRBOX (still thinking of ‘thermostat’), and wondering if BOX was a synonym for ’cheat’. Finally I threw that out and just started thinking of synonyms of ‘cheat’. CON and DO are the biggest ones I think you’ll see in cryptics and you should be on guard for both.
As I said, I’d never heard of AIRCON but it’s clearly a shortening of ‘air conditioning’.
23 Extremes of emotion left expert in bind (6)
ENLACE is not super common., but one thing you develop a taste for in cryptics is getting a sense of whether something is a word. (‘En’ is a prefix that can be put on a verb that achieves a change in state.) This tip won’t work for Mephisto puzzles, or monthly specials, or even for many 15x15s, but with Quickies it’s definitely a skill to use.
But again, with Quickies, you can count on the wordplay 100%. ‘Extremes of emotion’ cannot mean anything but EN, that is, the first and last letters of the word ‘enlace’. The word ‘left’ cannot mean anything in this context but L or PORT. If ENPORT was a word, or ‘expert in bind’ could possibly be the definition, we’d be in a bind indeed! But those don’t pass muster.
So we have ENL _ _ _ and what remains is ‘expert’ and the definition is ‘bind’. ‘Expert’ = ACE is very common and one to put in your journal of common short words and abbreviations.
The moral of the story is: wordplay wordplay wordplay.
2 Ministerial oversight? (8.5)
Not much to say about this one. You’ll need some checkers, and you’ll need to know the expression. Also it’s important to recognize that, given the question mark and the number of words, this is likely a cheeky definition. I had C _ E _ I _ A _ and thinking of ‘ministerial’ made me think of CLERICAL, but still I didn’t get the joke until I started writing it in.
3 Detachment from delegation escorting French playwright (7)
I got this one from crossing letters (even though I don’t know a thing about IONESCO other than I’ve seen his name before), so I won’t be of much help. I didn’t even realize this was a hidden word clue.
But here’s what I’ll say. If you’re struggling with Quickies, start focusing on improving your recognition of hidden words and anagrams. Both of these put the letters for the answer right in front of you, and if you can get better at these you’ll get more footholds into puzzles.
6 One of four in “Sunday best” turned up before interval (8,5)
Again a hard one to give advice for. Clues about grammatical terms (‘a’ for INDEFINITE ARTICLE or ‘went, for example’ for VERB) or punctuation are tricky, as they are super super meta. But when you see ‘one of four’, you’ve gotta start thinking, especially in a Quickie, “Okay, what are there four of?”. The only thing is the punctuation mark.
Unfortunately, ‘interval’ for COMMA is super vague, so if you don’t know the term, you’re gonna have trouble here.
9 Large seat in crimson given a new home? (9)
I don’t know what problem you had here, but it is absolutely crucial to know that in a Quickie puzzle, ‘crimson’ = RED, and the definition is ‘given a new home’, which means that the answer has to be:
RE _ _ _ _ _ ED
because ‘in’ must mean that we’re putting ‘large seat’ inside RED, and ‘given a new home’ 100% means that the answer is RE+(past tense verb). Being on the lookout for RE+(verb) definitions is definitely part of any crossword solvers bag of tricks (even US-style crosswords).
So, did you get that far? If you got that far and you still didn’t get the answer, pat yourself on the back. You’re doing well! If you didn’t, take note of these wordplay aspects I take for granted, and get them in your system!
14 Prejudiced, dismissing head craftsman (7)
Hard to get without checkers, but hopefully you know that the answer means ‘craftsman’, and is obtained by removing the first letter of a word meaning ‘prejudiced’.
15 A cactus chopped in half, one by a shrub
You will never see ‘chopped in half’ in a 15×15. So as a solver of quickies, you must latch on to this hint and realize that ‘cactus chopped in half’ must give CAC or TUS. This means that the first ‘a’ must mean A, so the answer is either ACAC _ _ or ATUS _ _ . Did you get that far?
The next words are ‘one by a’, and in a Quickie, ‘one’ must mean I, and ‘a’ must mean A. So the answer is ACACIA or ATUSIA, and if you got that far and needed to look up both in a dictionary, again, pat yourself on the back because you’re doing great!
This clue is very different from 14 Down, which requires you to pluck 7- and 8-letter words out of your mind with only a one-word synonym to help. There isn’t a single part of the wordplay in 15 Down which requires you to know the definition of any word. It is all wordplay, and if you weren’t aware of that, ask yourself how you got off track.
When you see ‘almost’ in a Quickie, you 100% can conclude that ‘necessity, almost’ means a synonym for ’necessity’ minus the last letter. You gotta lock into that right away.
That means the definition must be ‘one lent money’, and note that this can never ever ever in a crossword mean LOANER, because definitions are always given in the present tense (“one who lends money”) unless the past tense is part of the definition. That’s a convention of crossword puzzles and if you didn’t know it, now you do!
So, it must mean ‘one who has been lent money’, which is surely crossword-ese for something ending in -EE.
But I’d start with ‘behold’, which in a Quickie is 100% going to be LO. It’s archaic but you gotta know it. Then of course ‘a’ must be A, so we have LOA _ _ _ , and now we’re well on our way.
I don’t think this would be allowed in US-style puzzles because LOANEE and ‘lent’ share a word root.
18 Payload missing odd parts on second mission (5)
If you didn’t immediately recognize this as a hidden letters clue, you gotta up your game! When you see ‘every other part’ or ‘missing odd parts’, go straight to the word and write down what you get: pAyLoAd -> ALA _ _ .
What’s left is ‘on second mission’. Could the answer be ‘second mission’? Then ‘on’ could be ON or RE. Could the answer be ALARE? ALAON?
Alternatively, the missing two letters could come from ‘second’, and in a Quickie, ‘second’ will always be S or MO (for ‘moment’). If you don’t know these, learn them!
I got that but I’m always confused as to whether it’s just from the one word or might it be several words?? Same with ‘extremely’. Is there a rule of thumb??
The trap is to let the existence of multiple options prevent you from considering either. Consider both. Write them down on the page in the margin. Once the jumble gets out of your head, it will most likely be much clearer.
“Payload missing odd parts on second mission” … I suppose this could be:
Payload / missing odd parts, ON SECOND MISSION
which would yield oN sEcOnD mIsSiOn -> NEODIO … nope, that’s not right. It usually only takes a second to dismiss an incorrect parsing… in a Quickie that is!
But you bring up a good question, so point some of these out to me in the future and we can discuss them!