Enigmatic Variations No. 1253: Famous Last Words by Kcit

Kcit’s puzzles range from the relatively straightforward to the definitely difficult, and you don’t know which it will be until about 30 minutes into the solve. His recent Listener, A Bit Up in the Air, was one of his gentler ones.

This week, Kcit had given us three different gimmicks to unravel. 31 clues had an extra word that needed removing before the clue could be solved; one letter, corresponding to the word’s position in the clue, contributed to the FAMOUS LAST WORDS, together with the name of the speaker. These last words would indicate how the answer to six normally-clued entries needed to be modified. Finally, thirteen clues had wordplay giving one incorrect letter; the right letters and the wrong letters would lead to a titular name and what that name represented. I wasn’t sure if I’d come across this last device before, and if I had, where.

Half an hour in, and I knew that I had one of Kcit’s more challenging crosswords to blog. Deciding which clues were of which type was tough. Moreover, the famous last words were interspersed with these other clue types, so it was difficult to guess at what they were.

One big mistake I made was not highlighting the thirteen devious wordplay letters in the grid. Had I done so, I would certainly ahve realised very early on that they were all likely to be in the NW–SE diagonal. I just wrote them beside the clues. Consequently, I ended up with DENIASHTASREVR and ECAFERREPOLTT. When I did check the diagonals near the end of my solve, I discarded the important one straightaway since it began either SREDNI… or RATHSAV…!

It was getting M•NR• at the end of the down clues that put me on the track of HH Munro, better known as Scottish author Saki. His famous last words were Put that bloody cigarette out!, just as he got shot by a sniper’s bullet in November 1916 while he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France. Thus, six answers lost colloquial words for cigarette before entry: ROACH, FAG, TAB, CIG, BURN, WEED.

The titular name was SREDNI VASHTAR who was a POLECAT-FERRET and the title of one of Saki’s short stories. These can both be found in the NW–SE diagonal, one consisting of the letters that should be given by the wordplay, the other by the wrong letters.

A tough, but enjoyable, puzzle this week. Hopefully Phi will have a setter’s blog ready fairly soon after this blog appears: Phi Online.

Solving time: About 4 hours.

Legend:
Definition in clue
GASPEREAU = cigarette not entered in grid
[Additional] = nth letter from nth word in clue
Correct letter in wordplay for ENTRY
Incorrect letter in wordplay for EN + CRY
ABC* = anagram
ABC< = reversal
in abCDef = hidden