Azed 2202 – ‘A Summer Serenade’ (DLM)

I’ve never been a great fan of DLM (definition and letter-mixture) puzzles: I tend to find them very hard to get started on, but once even a couple of answers are in it becomes easy to see roughly where the anagrams have to be, and completing the grid is reduced to a rather routine process, without the variety of clue-types that a normal puzzle provides. So it was with this one: after staring at a blank grid for a while I finally spotted TRUG for 31a from “turgescent” (unusual words are a good place to look for anagrams in DLMs), from which I soon got to 13d and 26d, and then was on to the aforementioned routine.

This puzzle differs in a couple of respects from some previous DLMs: (1) two answers per group of clues rather than three (though for example the last DLM before this – Azed 2097 in August 2012 – also had two); (2) rhyming couplets instead of mini-“articles” ; (3) although it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the preamble, each answer is clued by a D and LM that lie entirely with the corresponding clue. Items (1) and, especially, (3) make the solving process rather easier than it often is; items (2) and (3) must make the setting a lot harder, especially when the couplets join together to make a more or less coherent poem (the “Summer Serenade” of the title). Despite that achievement, it is, as I said, not my favourite type of Azed, but enjoyable enough as a change once in a while.

There were a couple of mistakes in the enumerations (shown below as published), and one in a clue number, but these were obvious and didn’t cause me any problems. Definitions are underlined in the clues below, and the anagrammed letters shown like this; as all the clues are of the same type I usually haven’t given any additional commentary.