I hope it’s just that I’m going through a bad patch at present, but I had a senior half-hour rather than a senior moment trying to remember the author of Hotel du Lac! My main problem was that I managed to invent a Greek poet called CERTAMENES for 20A, and although I began to have my doubts about him toward the end of my 30 minutes, I didn’t erase him as I should have done.
After the half-hour was up, I decided to look up 7D (ATONEMENT), and having established that CERTAMENES was definitely wrong, vaguely remembered MENECRATES – after which it still took me about a minute to remember BROOKNER. I then guessed JOSEPH, ROSENTHAL, IN TENEBRIS, UNDERTONES, HEAD (which I should have guessed before, as I didn’t have any further letters to help me now) and HAUPTMANN in fairly quick succession, but failed to guess ISSA correctly.
The NW corner proved far more problematic. I was annoyed with myself for not getting AVIARY (particularly as I’d made a tentative guess at MIAMI), but CHAST MAYD was tricky [so tricky in fact that I submitted CHAST MAID, and am grateful to linxit for pointing out that the spelling on the original title page (as shown in wikipedia) is CHAST MAYD] and I didn’t know either YAMA (I’d wrongly guessed NAME) or MACCARTHY, though I guessed the latter once I had all the crossing letters.
For anyone else who found this puzzle tough going, I can offer the encouragement that I found next week’s much easier.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | MAMET – MAME (Jerry Herman’s 1966 musical) + T; David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Oleanna (1992), etc (I thought at first that I was going to get this from the musical, but when GIGIT, HAIRT and CATST proved no use as playwrights I changed tack, and having reluctantly decided that there wasn’t really a musical called GENE, remembered that there was one called MAME) |
| 4 | HAUPTMANN – Gerhart Hauptmann wrote Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Dawn) (1889) and Vor Sonnenuntergang (Before Sunset) (1932) |
| 9 | CHAST MAYD – Sir Thomas Middleton wrote A Chast Maid in Cheapside (1613) (this is doubly tricky since it’s normally spelled A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and you’d expect it to be enumerated as (5,4) instead of (9)) |
| 10 | BOOBY – Mr B of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) reappears in Henry Fielding’s parody An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) as Mr Booby |
| 11 | AVIARY – A + VIA + RY; Katie Hickman wrote The Aviary Gate (2008) |
| 12 | BRIAREUS – BRIAR (= pipe) + E + US; in Greek mythology, Briareus is one of three 100-handed giants (I think “loyal” in the clue probably refers to Briareus’ loyalty to Zeus) |
| 14 | THE RAINBOW – D.H. Lawrence wrote The Rainbow (1915); James Stephens wrote Crock of Gold (1912) (referring to the crock of gold supposedly found at the end of a rainbow) |
| 16 | LEDA – hidden word (fabLED Account); Leda was seduced by Zeus disguised as a swan |
| 19 | YAMA – another citation from the OED, which states that in Hindu mythology Yama is the god and judge of the dead (with just the M in place, I guessed NAME, but I’m not sure that I’d have guessed YAMA even if I’d had the Y) |
| 20 | MENECRATES – (Cretan seem)*; Menecrates of Ephesus (330-270 BC) (once I’d abandoned the non-existent CERTAMENES and established that the answer ended it T-S, MENECRATES was the name that … I was going to say “sprang to mind”, but “bubbled up from some murky recess” would be more accurate; however, it could be that I was remembering the name of the character in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra) |
| 22 | THRILLER – initial letters of To Higher Rankings In Light Literature Easily Read |
| 23 | JOSEPH – Julia Frankau wrote Joseph in Jeopardy (1912) |
| 26 | IDLER – I’d assumed this referred to Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), but further investigation reveals that he was the first editor of the monthly magazine The Idler which ran from 1892 to 1911 |
| 27 | ROSENTHAL – Jack Rosenthal wrote the stage play Smash! (1981) |
| 28 | FRANCESCA – the story of Francesca da Rimini (1255-85) as told in Dante’s Divine Comedy is the subject of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini (1876) |
| 29 | REMUS – referring to the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris |
| Down | |
| 1 | MACCARTHY – the literary critic Sir Desmond MacCarthy wrote Drama (1940) and Theatre (1954) (the clue implies that the date for Theatre is 1952, but the DNB says that it was published (posthumously) in 1954 and the wikipedia gives the date as 1955) |
| 2 | MIAMI – Norman Mailer wrote Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (MIAMI was my best guess, but I stupidly forgot to type it in before my 30 minutes was up) |
| 3 | TUTORIAL – (ritual to)* |
| 4 | HEAD – The Headless Horseman (1865/6) is a novel by Mayne Reid (it was only when I came to look at the clue again after my 30 minutes was up that I realised that HEAD was the obvious guess) |
| 5 | UNDERTONES – Robert Williams Buchanan wrote Undertones (1863) |
| 6 | TOBIAS – the son of Tobit and protagonist of The Book of Tobit in the biblical apocrypha; Tobias Smollett (1721-71) |
| 7 | ATONEMENT – Eliza Lynn Linton wrote The Atonement of Leam Dundas (1876) (I suppose the setter felt that a clue referring to Ian McEwan’s book would be too easy – or perhaps he’d used it before) |
| 8 | NOYES – Alfred Noyes (1880-1958) used to turn up regularly in the daily cryptic, the combination of the conflicting answers NO and YES proving irresistible to setters (or maybe to one particular setter) |
| 13 | IN TENEBRIS – Thomas Hardy wrote three poems entitled In Tenebris which were published in his Poems of the Past and Present (1901); Bertold Brecht wrote the play Lux in Tenebris (1919?) |
| 15 | ESMERELDA – (damsel e’er)*; William Gillette (with Frances Hodgson Burnett) wrote the play Esmeralda (1881) (ESMERALDA is on my list of difficult words as the name of the character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and it’s the spelling normally used for the title of Gillette’s play; however, the solution given is ESMERELDA) |
| 17 | AESCHYLUS – Aeschylus (525-456 BC), regarded as the father of tragedy, fought at Marathon (490 BC) and won 13 first prizes at the Dionysia (though he was apparently highly miffed at being beaten by Sophocles in 468 BC) |
| 18 | BROOKNER – Anita Brookner’s novel Look at Me (1983) was followed by Hotel du Lac which won the 1984 Booker Prize (Hotel du Lac has been on my list of books to read since it won the Booker Prize, but sadly I’ve just never got round to it) |
| 21 | CLERIC – hidden word (vehiCLE RIChly); = “vicar” (“of Wakefield” being padding) |
| 22 | THIEF – E.W. Hornung wrote A Thief in the Night (1905), a book in his “Raffles” series; Arthur Koestler wrote Thieves in the Night (1946) |
| 24 | ETHAM – hidden word (macbETH AMply); see Exodus 13:20 |
| 25 | ISSA – Kobayashi Nobuyuki (1763-1828) was a famous writer of haikus who apparently used the pen name Issa (一茶) meaning “one (cup of) tea” (I’d never heard of ISSA, and guessed ISHA because it was a hidden word (hIS HAiku) – several days later I suddenly remembered quite out of the blue that isha (医者) in Japanese means “doctor”, which thus took even longer to emerge than BROOKNER!) |
Finally I’d welcome any suggestions about 3D from TLS Puzzle No. 806:
Partial description of Miss Cooper’s old provincial bank? (8) = NATIONAL
I might have stumbled on her if the person who added her wikipedia entry last year had added her to the list of people with surname Cooper as well. (I’ve done it myself now.)
I also had ESMERELDA, as that fits the anagram, and ISSA as I knew he was a haiku writer, although I didn’t understand the “cup of tea” reference. Quite a few unchecked alternatives this week, making it even harder.
CHAST MAYD sounds much more likely for 9A.
Tony, I think the puzzle number in the title should be 822.
Better luck with next week’s puzzle, which both linxit and I found significantly easier than this one.