Independent 8236/Phi

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The usual good crossword from Phi that I found a bit harder than usual. I’m still quite lost on 25ac and would be grateful for some help here: it will surely be forthcoming and then I’ll realise how feeble I’ve been.

For once I have some clue about the theme — the books of Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and Shame are all referred to, but no doubt there is more.

Across
1 ABIDES — bid in (sea)rev.
4 DAN{e} GER{MAN}
9 M(I(D)N)IGHT — 12 midnight, nothing to do with the answer to 12
10 {RE}VERSES
12 LET IT ALL HANG OUT — 2 defs overlapping I think, ‘Be relaxed’, and a whimsical one ‘Be relaxed about bunting?’
13 B(RACE L)ET
14 SHAM E
16 CRAS{he}S
18 OBLIGING — 2 defs
20 ELECTROMAGNETIC — (in comet get clear)*
23 {f}ORI(E)NT
24 CHILDREN — (ld (ER)rev.) in chin
25 TRENCH — sorry, lost here: it seems to be r [= end of river] in tench, but tench is not church; somehow the church might be the last two letters, but how does ten ch equal church?
26 A({o}RGY)LL
Down
1 AUDITORIA — Audi (a riot)* — I really should know that a vehicle manufacturer is always Audi; atria was misleading me
2 I D(1)OT 1 C
3 ETHYL ALCOHOL — (health coolly)* — ethyl alcohol is ordinary alcohol
5 A VE(R)NUS
6 GUST O — o = over, as in cricket
7 RO(SE{t})TTE{n}
8 EMIL — (lime)rev. — is this particularly a German name?
11 W(HIT EL)EATHER — I couldn’t understand this at first, but it’s simply that white leather is a type of leather or skin, and the Valencian, who had been a mystery to me, was simply ‘the’ in Valencian [ie Spanish]
15 AU NATUREL — (a rule)* in (tuna)*
16 C(HER)OOT — I had always thought that a coot was simply a fool rather than an old fool: is it that a coot is an old word for fool?
17 prisonerS AT A NICk — a clever hidden that was not immediately apparent
19 GUNPLAY — (plan)* in Guy — not a word I was very familiar with, but it refers to dexterity rather than transport
21 {t}EX{t}ILE
22 CANE — (enac{t})rev.

7 comments on “Independent 8236/Phi”

  2. Another good one from Phi, and another theme that passed me by.

    I agree with flashling about 25ac.

    Re 8dn, the only Emil I ever met was German; and of course there’s the famous ‘Emil and the Detectives’ by Erich Kästner.

    11dn took me some time to figure out, too. The use of ‘Valencian’ was quite clever; the language of Valencia is Catalan rather than (Castilian) Spanish. However, ‘the’ is ‘el’ in both languages.

    Thanks, John, for the blog.

  3. Good stuff as always from Phi, although the theme of course passed me by as usual. I parsed TRENCH the same way as flashling (living close to the River Trent is always a help when it comes up in puzzles) and I thought DANGER was particularly well clued.

    Thanks to John for blogging.

  4. Phi’s an odd one, I often send copies to my sister who’s not an expert solver but usually enjoys them as much as I do. But then he slips one like this in which I managed a total of three answers before giving up. Nothing wrong with it at all, just on a different planet today.

  6. Hi allan_c @5
    It was spam which somehow evaded the Akismet spam filter. Since its inception, the site has received over two million spam comments (the current rate is between 60,000 and 70,00 a month) and it is a credit to Akismet that so few get through to appear in posts. I am usualy able to delete those that do fairly quickly so most of the time very few people see them.

  7. I found this quite hard work, the usual fault of getting some fixed ideas stuck in my head being the problem. I failed to parse 11 because I was convinced the Valencia bit was at the end of the answer and didn’t think about it following strike. 21 also stumped me for a long time because I became convinced that the clue was omitting 1 T for the word for material and adding another T at the end rather than removing both Ts, so I thought it must be something like evict. I also failed to parse trench – now that I see it, I think it’s quite an interesting clue variation.

    Didn’t spot the theme, but then again I haven’t read a single book by Rushdie, so not very likely that I would.

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