There were three kinds of clue here:
13 were ‘beset by inflation’ — they each included an extra letter.
13 were ‘beset by recession’ — a character string (not necessarily a whole word) within the clue needed to be reversed before solving.
The rest were normal, but their solutions had to ‘suffer property repossessions’ before being entered in the grid. This meant that a word for a property had to be removed. Nice idea, though I think some were a touch sub-prime execution-wise, when what was omitted was half of a two-word phrase (although, to be fair, at least all entries were proper words).

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Solving time: 24 minutes.

 One I tackled while in hospital.  Although it wasn’t the most satisfying of puzzles, it held me while I worked out whether each of the homophone double answers could be worse than the previous one.  The preamble called them “exact or cheeky”; I could think of alternative names for them, most would be unprintable here.

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When I first downloaded this one, it lacked a preamble. Having solved it without one (not boasting or anything!), I returned to the website, where a brief preamble had been added. The principle, also the answer to 10,17,12,18, is the second part of: “It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen” — a quotation from the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, himself (via a namesake) the answer to 13ac.

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The theme required solutions to be adapted before entry but said nothing of the clues. Noticing that the answer lengths were one or two less than the grid lengths this suggested some addition to each answer as it was entered into the grid. Treating the clues as normal I solved a few intersecting clues cold. After three of four from the top corner it stood out that each answer so far contained a double-you and that the only way to get the words to fit the grid was to do something with these double-yous. Unfortunately 1a and 1d both went in, and remained real words, if the W became a QU. This didn’t work for the next couple of answers!

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Thematic answers are all types of of light, camera or action. These clues don’t have definitions, apart from the number referring to 1d, 2d or 3d. Once you work that out, without a preamble to help, it’s fairly straightforward. Enigmatist finds a variety of ways to say that one word or character string is contained within another.

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Solving time: a couple of hours or so

This was harder than it looked on the surface. I’ve been solving the Listener puzzle for a couple of years now, so clues with a misprint in them are quite familiar to me, and don’t evoke the dread they used to any more. However, a lot of these seemed harder to spot than usual, and some clues had several candidates for the misprinted word.

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When Neil asked for someone to blog this one, I had just printed it out, so I readily volunteered, having to date completed all the Geniuses I have attempted, most of them without much (or any) difficulty, and even having won the £100 lottery on one occasion. So much for my hubris — this has to be the most difficult Genius yet! Serves me right for writing to the Guardian’s crossword editor that Genius preambles are usually more helpful than Listener ones; this preamble just about had me defeated. I was forced in the end to resort to collusion (and please note that I did not submit the eventual solution). Thanks to our colleague Michod for his help on the final step.

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A pleasing puzzle based on the affectionate nickname of the paper, famous for its misprints. The eight-letter words had to be entered by shifting their letters in the same way so e.g. as Grauniad became Guardian, acrimony becomes aircyonm. Though it did not say so in the preamble, the definition and letter mixture (DLM) clues were the eight 6-letter words in the puzzle.

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This was the least challenging Genius for a while, but it was an enjoyable solve, nonetheless. Once you solved the across clues, you were left with a fairly straightforward anagram, and the down clues weren’t overly difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

The trouble with blogging a monthly crossword comes if you don’t write your blog after solving.

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I’ve not done these before but the Genius series is monthly series in the online (only) Guardian that offers a preambled themed puzzle which doesn’t require frequent round-trips to Chambers. Yet.

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