Across
1 LOSS ADJUSTER – los (sad, just) er
10 NETBALL – n, (ballet)* – Good clue.
11 DIABOLO – anag. of what remains after deleting the letters t, e, n, d, s from ‘bloodstained’ – What do crossword manual writers or solvers think when the letters to be deleted are disparate as in this instance?
12 OOMPH – O,o,mph – o (of) as in ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ – You might argue if mph is speed or speed rate.
13 PREGNANT – g n in (parent)*
15 VAMPIRE BAT – a, MP, (ire, b)* in vat
16 STUN – most of the letters in ‘astound’, the letters being in the same order
18 NERD – hidden in ‘EnNERDale’ – Just learnt that ‘anorak’ means this, besides ‘waterproof outer jacket’
20 SETTLEMENT – double definition -Neat clue.
22 EQUALITY – e, quality
24 STEAL – s, teal
26 CHAPATI – ‘pat’ in ‘chai’ – Good clue what with ‘chai’ being a component in wordplay. – What I will eat at 1 p.m. though chapati is more common and regular a dish in north India than in south India where I live. Has several spelling variants so wordplay must lead to the correct one as it does here. My own efforts may be feeble: Indian bread for the fellow at deli at last (7) or A word of thanks sent up to the man who makes Indian bread (7)
27 CONDONE – con, don, E (the drug)
28 BEYOND BELIEF – (bodyline)* in ‘beef’ (argument)
Down
2 OPTIMUM – o, p, ti<, mum – I like this clue for its surface reading, bringing to mind the proverb “speech is silver, silence is golden”
3 SMASH HIT – (Smith has)* – Anagram indicators such as ‘doctor’, the one used here, give us a thrill when we encounter them first. Here it’s correctly used before part of the anag fodder and is pleasing.
4 DALE – every odd letter in ‘DeAdLiEr’
5 UNDERPANTS – (and punters)* – Very good clue with excellent def, anag fodder and anagrind.
6 TWANG – from the def ‘accent’ – I don’t see the wordplay
7 RIOT ACT – Ah, got the hang of the wordplay just at this moment – Rio t[-r)act – With the enumeration 4,3, I considered ‘tear gas’ before rejecting it!
8 INCONVENIENCE – Toilets open to the public in common areas are often called “public conveniences”; a convenience that is broken or malfunctioing could conceivably be an ‘inconvenience’. At least in India the flush system in most public toilets just doesn’t function.
9 FORTUNE-TELLER – anag of ‘not true’ in ‘feller’ (man); ‘futures’ not in the financial sense; ‘man’ perhaps does double duty as part of wordplay and part of def. Purists might object to nounal anagrind preceding the anag fodder but I like this clue.
14 PEDESTRIAN – double definition – It is.
17 PERSONAL – P, (Orleans)*
19 RHUBARB – “rue”, barb; def: row (squabble, dispute) – Good surface reading.
21 EYESORE – When we write some thirty clues in a puzzle, we can’t help one or two being 14d
23 LEAFY – f in (Yale)* – Nice clue. The anagrind ‘compound’ is so apposite.
25 SCAB – hidden in PariS CABaret – Did this scab prevent the dancer from striking a pose?
Hello,
This puzzle had some great anagrams. As a solver I don’t mind the removal of disjoint letters (11A), so long as tends means ‘t,e,n,d,s’ and not a synonym for “tends”.
12A: Didn’t get the point about speed rate. Isn’t speed by itself the rate of motion, and mph the unit of speed?
Hi Rishi
6d T (start [of] ‘to’) GNAW (chew) reversed
Thanks, Geoff. I just couldn’t get out of the mindset “Start to chew – C”. So your enclosing ‘of’ within square brackets was most helpful.
I don’t think (start [of] ‘to’) is good enough. There is no ownership stated in the clue, so none should be implied. The clue correctly should’ve resulted in ‘C’. It wouldn’t have been hard to put a sensible word starting with T before ‘chew’.