Another amazing themed puzzle by this masterly setter. Every across answer contains two successive Os – except for the first and last, which contain another flourish – in the top one the clue contains “contents of book” i.e. its middle letters oo and the final across entry is SCORELESS DRAWS i.e. 0-0s. All this achieved with the downs being everyday words.
Solving time: 18 mins, with the theme evident fairly early on.
ACROSS
1 LICENSED TO KILL James Bond
12 ROOM crazY Moor reversed. Othello, the Moor, Shakespeare play.
14 OVERT O (ring) OK (fair)
19 LA GO ON
21 FOOLSCAP Before metric sizes came in, this was the rough equivalent of A4, though it was bigger. Draft initially refers to D being written on a dunce’s cap.
25 SHOO(t)S
28 SCORELESS DRAWS
DOWN
2 IS O TOPE
4 SNAP SHOT Still = photo
6 ON THE BOIL
7 IRON OUT Not a expert in golf, but I think you’d use a driver for the first (tee) shot, then an iron for the second.
8 LEPER A very pleasingly worded hidden.
9 CHAR COAL “charr” “cole”
18 POT (HOOK) S First reading suggested the other way around, but it’s quite OK.
20 GAL(l) I LEO “Scientist giving a lot of annoyance to one pope” An excellent @lit
22 CHOCTAW Double definition – the first referring to skating.
24 MAINS “Manes” Shocks of hair.
Another corker from the boy Virgilius. I think I twigged the theme after half a dozen or so across clues. I got 1A almost straight away from the definition and enumeration but couldn’t work out what the wordplay meant so thanks for explaining that.
Hats off, again.
What was the clue for 1A? (reading these notes obviously 007 is another OO… but I’d be curious as to the actual clue).
“Like Bond, as indicated by contents of book” (8,2,4)
Yes, it’s the OO (or should that be 00?) status that allows for all the murdering.
014 – to which the answer is traditionally ‘double agent’ – would, presumably, only be licensed to half-kill us.
Thanks for that clarification, Paul B. As one not too deeply into the Bond books and films, I’d a niggling suspicion something like that was involved.