I tend to enjoy Tees’ puzzles these days, but I struggled a bit with some of this one, so it’ll be interesting to hear how other folks got on.
Spotting the Nina helped: we have TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA around the perimeter, and a reference to it in 16/9/34. There may be other thematic material but Shakespeare is not among your blogger’s strong points.
*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 6 | HATCH – H + AT + CH. |
| 8 | PLANTAIN – (L + ANT) in PAIN, which is French for bread. Pierre Gagnaire appears to be a French chef, so this is quite a nice reference. I hadn’t heard of him, but it’s easy to spot that the point is, he’s French. |
| 10 | ABLE – from the famous palindrome: Able was I, ere I saw Elba, supposedly spoken by Napoleon. “Able” isn’t intuitively the “end” of it, the front end maybe. |
| 11 | RESULTANT – SULTAN in (RE + T). |
| 13 | ODE – D in OE. |
| 14 | NORM – N OR M. N being a letter, and M being the one previous to it in the alphabet. |
| 15 | INDISCREET – I + (TEN CIDERS)*. |
| 19 | OXEN – [ri]O XEN[xem]. |
| 20 | STAIR – I in STAR. |
| 21 | SEAL – dd. |
| 23 | ROYAL TRAIN – TAYLOR* + RA + IN. |
| 26 | EPEE – [fo]E + PEE. |
| 27 | GUV – G + U + V. |
| 28 | DROP A BOMB – (O + PAB[l]O) in (DR + MB). |
| 32 | EDAM – D (Roman numeral for 500) in MAE< (West). The cheese that is famously made backwards. |
| 33 | ESCAPIST – IS in ASPECT*. |
| Down | |
| 1 | THE BRONX – HEBRON in TX. A borough of New York, famous for its cheery disposition. |
| 2 | WHERE IT’S AT – (IS THE WATER)*. |
| 3 | OPUS – (SUP + 0)<. |
| 4 | GALL – G + ALL. |
| 5 | ETNA – E + ANT<. |
| 7 | THEOMANIA – THE + OMANI + A. |
| 12 | TEC – TEC. Short for detective, thus “private dick”. T is Troy, a unit of weight for things like gold, while EC is the postcode area for The City. |
| 16/9/34 | DRAMA IN THE ROUND – (UNMARRIED AND HOT)*. A reference to the Nina, as mentioned in the preamble. |
| 17 | SPRING BORN – Spoonerism of “bring spawn”. |
| 18 | RIS DE VEAU – DRIVES* + EAU. A new term for me, but eminently solveable from wordplay and checking. |
| 22 | ADELAIDE – A + DEAL* + IDE[a]. |
| 24 | ORDOS – [fyod]OR DOS[toevsky]. This beat me: I’ve never heard of it, and “one for” doesn’t seem to suggest a substring to me. |
| 25 | LOP – O in LP. |
| 29 | OLAV – 0 + LAV. |
| 30 | ASIF – AS IF. |
| 31 | OTTO – I got this from the checking and the Nina, but cannot explain it at all. |
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