Enigmatic Variations No. 1048: Missing Title by Nutmeg

Another annoyingly misleading editing error in the preamble – which starts: ‘Half of the 24 clued answers…’ but should probably start: ‘Half of the 48 clued answers…’, or ‘Of the 48 clued answers, 24/half…’. Anyway, these 24 need to suffer ‘a related loss’ to form the grid entry. ‘Most’ of these can be construed as an 11D by a character to be found in the grid. Initial letters of the other (24) clues form a partial ‘further explanation’, which needs to be finished off below the grid. Is that clear?! It took a few readings and re-readings before I really got a grip of what was going on…

There are 48 clued answers, plus 11D to be deduced. After some time scanning up and down the initial letters of the across clues  – M S F T Y H E R E C M A S C P I N D E D R… I came up with ‘THE REMAINDER…’ as the most likely phrase: M S F T Y H E R E C M A S C P I N D E D R… followed, after a lot more trial-and-error, by HAVE NEITHER A …

This helped to focus the mind on these clues being entered normally, and the other clues as requiring ‘losses’ from their solutions before entry. The first few of the ‘loss’ clues that I solved were TAPAS, PARSE, MAY TREES – all of which seemed to need to lose two letters. But there wasn’t an obvious common pair of letters. Then I hit on PAYMASTER and EMANCIPATE – whch needed to lose four letters – and, with a few crossing letters from ‘normal’ entries, it became clear that either PA or MA needed to be excluded.

So, the phrase became ‘THE REMAINDER HAVE NEITHER A ‘PA’ NOR A ‘MA’ – with the missing title word as PANORAMA.

Which left the thematic deduction of 11D, and the ‘character’ appearing in the grid. 11D turned out to be MISFORTUNE, which was LADY BRACKNELL’s (top-left to bottom-right) suggestion, in ‘The Importance Of Being Earnest’, for the loss of one parent (a PA or a MA). So ‘most’ of the thematic entries (19) just lost MA or PA, and the remaining 5 have ‘neither a PA NOR A MA’: EMANCIPATE, PAROXYSMAL, PAYMASTER, REPAIRMAN, SMARTYPANTS.

I was planning to do a fancy flashing grid, á la Kenmac, but the demands of the festive season have sapped my energy and time, so here is just a snapshot of the grid with MAs and PAs appended. Maybe next time…

A very enjoyable – and reasonably tough – EV I thought, once I had got my head around the pre-amble, and had worked out those initial letters for the phrase. There was still a fair amount of work to do to winkle out some fairly challenging clues – and I invalidated my original prize entry as I lazily assumed 7A was PAROXYSM, rather than parsing it fully for PAROXYSMAL, which induced a paroxysm of pain as I slapped my forehead…d’oh!

 Thanks to Nutmeg, and to all the EV setters this year – and here’s hoping for a gremlin-free 2013… (;+>)