TLS Crossword 1170 by Myrtilus – April 7, 2017. Knock knock. Who’s there?

Author   oliviarhinebeckPosted on Categories Other Crosswords
A captivating piece of whimsy with the now classic Myrtilus touch.  I printed this to look at in the car driving up to the country for the first time this season while I was sitting in the back with Number One grandson.  We took breaks for conversation and jokes so I can’t give a time, but I had it done (all my own work) within the 2 hours the trip takes us.  I couldn’t have done this with the Broteas 1167 which was the subject of my previous blog, but it was good to force the grey cells to do their stuff outside the magnetic field of Google.  There were some fast times on the Club board.  Definitions in italics underlined.  Answers in bold caps.

Across
1.  A Smollett sailor‘s weapon against fish (7)
BOWLING.  BOW=weapon.  LING=fish.  In The Adventures Of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett, Tom Bowling is a nautical uncle of the hero.
5.  Glass house housing marble vessels (7)
GALLEYS.  G[las]S – outer letters (house) containing (housing) ALLEY=marble.  Put this together with 1A and we have our Myrtilus pun.  It reminded me of a local NY accent in which Long Island is pronounced “Lawn Guyland”.
9.  He wrote to Althea; her cold cavalier criminal (7,8)
RICHARD LOVELACE.  Anagram (criminal) of HER COLD CAVALIER.  17th Century Cavalier poet, wrong but wromantic.  “Stone walls do not a prison make” – written while he was gaoled for publicly protesting an act of Parliament in the run-up to the Civil War.  Good clue.
10. Mound of rock, not of earth (6)
TUFFET.  TUFF=rock.  ET=extra-terrestrial (not of earth).  Apparently “tuff” is a kind of volcanic rock.  I’d thought a tuffet was just a sort of pouf Miss Muffet sat on but it’s more than that.
11.  Corgi, perhaps with the Queen away, becomes run down (5,3)
PETER OUT.  PET=corgi.  ER=Queen.  OUT=away.  Here’s where I made the mistake of starting on the knock knock jokes with the grandson (Kurt Remarque, Stan Dandeliver etc) which he didn’t altogether get, which then segued into Pokemon jokes which I don’t get at all.  It ate up quite a bit of the drive time anyway.
13. In a dumb way, it’s how this grid started (10)
WORDLESSLY.  Double definition.
14.  Skylight author listened to a musical (4)
HAIR.  Homophone (listened to).  At first I had the wrong strand of the double helix (that’s not my coinage – it came from Vallaw, late of the Club) and entered “Hare”, as in David, author of the 90s play Skylight in which the female lead actually cooks dinner on stage, rather than the 60s musical in which the cast actually take all their clothes off onstage.  I did briefly wonder if the author might be “Katz”.
16.  Drood’s girl was orphaned, not completely rejected (4)
ROSA.  Bud, fiancee of the title character in the unfinished Dickens mystery novel,  Hidden in [w]SA OR[phaned], reversed (rejected).
17.  Dreadful poseurs in a novel (10)
PERSUASION.  Anagram (dreadful) of POSEURS IN A.  Jane Austen’s autumnal last novel, published posthumously.
20.  Guildenstern is one messenger who’s tense inside (8)
COURTIER.   Partner of Rosencrantz in Hamlet.  MESSENGER=courier containing T=tense.
21. Monster cheese left by a writer (6)
GORGON.  French writer Emile ZOLA leaves the odiferous cheese.
23.  One revealed as Philip Fairlie’s child bride? (3,5,2,5)
THE WOMAN IN WHITE.  Double definition.  A bride may be a woman in white (I wasn’t).  And in the Wilkie Collins novel, the plot turns on the close resemblance between the legitimate daughter of Philip (Laura Fairlie) and Anne Catherick, his illegitimate child.  Anne habitually dresses in white and first appears so, having escaped from confinement in an asylum.
24.  A dish of dip held by Algernon’s butler (7)
LASAGNE.  SAG=dip, contained in (held by) LANE=the butler to Algernon Moncrieff in the Importance Of Being Earnest.
25.  Lowell finally admitted to coarse material (7)
EARTHLY.  Last letter in [Lowel]L contained in (admitted to ) EARTHY=coarse.

Down

1.  The draw of the pub for a Yorkshire novelist (7)
BARSTOW.  BAR’S=of the pub.  TOW=draw.  Stan, author most famously of the 1960 novel A Kind Of Loving, which was adapted for film, tv and radio.
2. Schoolmaster wants fewer quads strewn with rocks (8,7)
WACKFORD SQUEERS.  The dastardly Dickens dean of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby.  Anagram (strewn) of FEWER QUADS ROCKS.  I imagine some of us wrote this in without waiting to parse which word was the anagram indicator and which was one of the the components.
3.  One with allure by Bronte, originally a Linton? (8)
ISABELLA.  From Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.  She marries Heathcliff and the plot thickens.  I=one.  SA=allure.  Bell=Ellis Bell, Emily’s nom de plume.  With A.
4.  Highest circle of Hades for one close to Catullus (4)
GODS.  The topmost (and least expensive) tier in a theatre.  GOD=Hades with S = last letter in [Catullu]S.
5.  Poe might have produced this flyer on tissue (10)
GOOSEFLESH.  GOOSE=flyer.  FLESH=tissue.  Edgar Allan’s spooky stories might have this effect.  In this part of the US they’re called goosebumps and the childrens’ author, R.L. Stine, wrote a series so entitled.  Less attractively, my mother always calls them goose pimples.
6.  Principal vocal works by Schubert (6)
LIEDER.  Another double helix.  “Vocal” does double duty here, as part of the definition and as the homophone indicator.  Sounds like LEADER=principal, but here it is the great song oeuvre by Franz Schubert.
7.  Maybe just a small glass, to aid concentration? (11,4)
EVAPORATING DISH.  Used in physics to reduce a liquid solution to its essentials.  Even a small glass of something would be no help to my concentration but I think Verlaine does things differently.
8.  Noisy chap lifting rubbish bags (7)
STENTOR.  ROT=rubbish and NETS=bags, reversed (lifting).
12.  Solemnly state rebuke after fool embraces the First Lady (10)
ASSEVERATE.  ASS=fool.  RATE=rebuke.  Containing (embraces) EVE=First Lady.
15.  Achilles, say, or Hector’s craft for fighting (3-2-3)
MAN-OF-WAR.  Both Achilles and Hector were notable participants in the Trojan War – at least when the former wasn’t sulking in his tent.  In additional to the battleship, there is also the Portuguese man o’ war which is a kind of venomous jellyfish.  When we had family holidays in Brittany eons ago I found a whole lot of them washed up on the beach and thought they were beautiful iridescent balloons, things to be played with.  Luckily they must have been dead.
16.  Article about musical performance (7)
RECITAL.  Anagram (about) of ARTICLE.
18. Change of scene proposed by Hamlet director, beginning to edit lines (7)
NUNNERY.  Recommended to Ophelia as a lifestyle choice.  NUNN=director (Trevor, see Cats, RSC etc).  E[dit].  RY=lines.
19.  Potent creator of quiet thoughts (6)
STRONG.  Patience Strong was a 20th Century British poet and this was the title of a 1930s anthology of her work.
22.  A Nobel winner‘s conduct when leaving university (4)
GIDE.  Andre, won the 1947 literature prize.  G[u]IDE.

11 comments on “TLS Crossword 1170 by Myrtilus – April 7, 2017. Knock knock. Who’s there?”

  1. Knock-knock jokes and crosswords go back a long way – in 1937, one of Torquemada’s puzzles was called “Knock-knock” and includes about 16 of them as clues in a “Blank who?” “Blank Dandeliver” format.

    Maybe one day in the distant future, the car journey with granny will be part of the answer to “What got you started with those weird cryptic crosswords?”.

    1. Going to see if I can find that Torquemada puzzle. I’ll try to stick around long enough to get the grandson started on crosswords. Of his immediate family I’m the one who best deciphers his phonetic spelling – probably thanks to training with dodgy homophones. His recipe for a hamburger: Poot th met on th girrl. Cuk it. Poot th met on th bunn. Etc.
  2. Just to clear things up as requested, 1168 by Talos included the Wilkie Collins without the definite article, raising the doubt that it was really the book title. Broteas clearly took the query on board and corrected the omission, which was kind.

    I liked this one, and completed in around 3/4 hour. Patience Strong evoked strong memories: an aunt of mine always Christmassed us with the annual Patience Strong Companion, one of those books that got parked in the loo for contemplation long before the days of smartphones.

    I freely admit being hornswoggled by the Gods clue, ransacking such knowledge as I have of Roman poets who might be friends of Catullus, and circles of Hades. That it was Hades, not Hell, should have rung alarm bells, of course, but that was a very fine clue.

    I managed to misread the the reversed ROSA and spelt it with an E. Dumb.

    Edited at 2017-04-28 09:35 am (UTC)

    1. It was really embarrassing how long I took to get what the discussion was all about which was why I was uncharacteristically piano at the time!
  3. Just to clear things up as requested, 1168 by Talos included the Wilkie Collins without the definite article, raising the doubt that it was really the book title. Broteas clearly took the query on board and corrected the omission, which was kind.

    I liked this one, and completed in around 3/4 hour. Patience Strong evoked strong memories: an aunt of mine always Christmassed us with the annual Patience Strong Companion, one of those books that got parked in the loo for contemplation long before the days of smartphones.

    I freely admit being hornswoggled by the Gods clue, ransacking the such knowledge as I have of Roman poets who might be friends of Catullus, and circles of Hades. That it was Hades, not Hell, should have rung alarm bells, of course, but that was a very fine clue.

    I managed to misread the the reversed ROSA and spelt it with an E. Dumb.

    1. That discussion rings a bell now. Was the verdict that titles can be with or without the The in the TLS?
      1. At present there is no clear rule about whether “The” should be included. In my last few puzzles, I’ve had a fair number of titles with it, but it potentially means there’s a minor giveaway at the beginning of each answer, unless we make sure that titles beginning with other 3-letter words are included. (Possibly a good thing in my puzzles, he says before anyone else does.) If I knew there were different “The XXXX” and “XXXX” books, I hope I’d insist that the definition for either answer was based on the right one.
  4. I tackled this one this morning and gave myself 20 minutes to see how far I could get. Answer: about two thirds. Very entertaining, as always. The blog likewise, Olivia, so thank you. I had almost forgotten about knock knock jokes. It feels like they’re due for a revival.

    I had pencilled in ‘Katz’ at 14a, as well. Though I don’t know who Katz is, other than Bill Bryson’s possibly imaginary and odorous travelling companion in several of his books (a terrific creation, if that’s what he is).

    Moment of gratuitous ‘sharing’ and name-dropping coming up. When I was a pimply teenager I won a short story competition, the prize for which was a week at a workshop in Devon hosted by 1d’s Stan Barstow. He was a last-minute replacement for Alan Sillitoe (sort of a like-for-like angry young man deal), much to my disappointment as I’d never heard of Stan. But he proved to be a stellar choice and a raconteur of the highest order. Every night I got to sit by the fire and listen to him and a bearded professor of statistics, who was a prolific author of erotic-going-on-filthy historical fiction, swapping ever raunchier and very, very funny stories as the level on the whiskey bottle dropped. That’s a week I wouldn’t have missed for anything. I came away with a bit of a hero-worship thing for Stan Barstow that’s never gone away. Great man.

    1. If you can’t do a bit of name-dropping here Sotira where can you? Nice story and I can picture it although I really can’t imagine you as ever being pimply.
    2. And there was me worrying that solvers wouldn’t be familiar with him. I needn’t have worried. The film of A Kind of Loving is still somewhere in the back of my memory. I’ll have to Utube it. June Ritchie, I remember.
  5. A good challenge this one, pleased to finish all correct. With the homophone indicators in the middle (the double helix as I shall now think of it) I had to wait for Lovelace to go in before I would chance Lieder and Stentor to go in before I would put in Hair. Stentor also confirmed for me that I was not looking for the musical Cats or the author (possibly) Katz. Thanks for parsing Tuffet, I didn’t know Tuff was a rock. Few bits of guesswork as usual, crosswordland’s most ubiquitous fish helped at 1ac. Crosswordland’s most ubiquitous literary allusion (recent!y anyway) helped at 23ac. I think I’ve seen the same or a similar anagram as at 17ac in a normal Times puzzle or perhaps a weekend puzzle but still enjoyed when the penny dropped. A bit hesitant at 15dn even though enumeration left little doubt in case the reference to Hector and Achilles was something more specific of which I was unaware other than that they were just warriors. Thanks setter and thanks blogger.

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