Guardian 27,492 / Picaroon

73 comments on “Guardian 27,492 / Picaroon”

1. If Picaroon played football, he’d be Mo Salah.

2. As Eileen says, a really ingenious puzzle. I only spotted the theme by solving the NOVELISTS anagram. Favourites were SATYR, STEIN, TWAIN and MEREDITH. Many thanks to P & E.

3. Agreed: what a cracker! Thanks Eileen and bravo to Picaroon for such a tour-de-force.

4. Agreed with all above. Excellent puzzle.

5. Eileen’s said it all in her introduction.   A brilliant crossword leaving me with a satisfied smile

   Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen

6. Loved it – though it took me ages to solve as it was one of those grids whose four quadrants were almost separate puzzle. I find these difficult as I am a solver who needs crossers to assist with the solve.

   Thank goodness for 11d which pulled everything together.

   I liked lots of answers but was particularly enamoured of VILLETTE at 13a (I am a Bronte tragic having taught the Bronte novels for many years) and ORLEANS at 24a (having studied “L’Alouette” by Jean Anouilh).

   Lovely that you got to blog this one, Eileen – I can’t think of anyone better to notice all the finer points of a literature-themed puzzle.

   Must admit I did not know the clothing meaning of CAPOTE – only of the gangster and Truman – so I didn’t parse this one – but that was all that the anagram could be. The clue for 12d STEIN was so clever, though it was only with hindsight that I thought of Gertrude. Lastly, I really enjoyed CARY Grant at 21d even though it was not thematic.

   Much appreciated, Picaroon and Eileen.

7. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.
   Generally I use crosswords merely as mental exercise – a pleasant enough but somewhat humdrum way of keeping my brain active. This was one of the very few that I really enjoyed. There wasn’t a single clue that I’d criticise.
   I had at least heard of all the writers, though I assumed CARY was Australian Peter, having forgotten he is actually Carey.

8. As Julie in Australia @6 has probably now realised, CARY is indeed thematic… but she’s not alone in learning something – I have discovered for the first time that Joyce Cary was a man!!

   As ever, I failed to see the theme, but did enjoy the pleasure, after getting NOVELISTS, of looking over the grid and realising what was going on.

   Thanks, Picaroon and Eileen.

9. Wow, wow, wow and WOW! Sheer delight from beginning to end! I loved the theme of 11dns, and the clueing was excellent throughout. Too many starred clues to list, but my top favorites were STEIN and FORESTER.
   Many thanks to Picaroon and Eileen (with an extra special thanks for providing links to all the 11dns) and the other commenters above, and those whose comments I look forward to reading below.

10. Oh of course, Chris in France@2 – well done! I even knew somewhere back in the dark recesses of my mind, once you said it, that Joyce Cary was a male author. Thank you for saying that I might have already realised it – the tone of some comments here make others feel diminished, while some comments like your post make us feel like it is a shared enterprise. Glad too that you know about Peter Carey, beaulieu@7.

11. Probably only a half dozen of the downers that I knew of, at least well enough to be able to give their forenames. But it didn’t matter in solving the puzzle. Also two acrossers I hadn’t heard of. Great stuff, JB.

12. Incidentally, Americans do not get STIs. They get STDs. Or so I hear.

13. Peter Car[e]y was the first one I tried to look up, too. JinA, your comment puzzled me for a minute or two  – but I thought the penny would drop for you before long. 😉 I only know the Anouilh in translation but I did see / read Shaw’s ‘St Joan’ long ago.

14. Sorry Eileen, I only just realised that the links you referred to in your intro had been embedded in the solutions, so I have now clicked on some of them and seen that you had already linked 21d to Joyce CARY. And I am now enjoying revisiting links to NOVELISTS like CHANDLER at 4d, who featured recently in an intriguing theme in another puzzle…

15. We crossed Eileen – thank you for your post – I should have realised that your blog would go the extra mile, as usual.

16. [And yes Eileen, I recall teaching Shaw’s “St Joan” to senior secondary students back in the day.]

17. There is little I can add but my thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

18. Julie in Australia @6 – the gangster is Capone rather than Capote, isn’t he?

19. Thanks Picaroon, a tour-de-force in setting. Most of the authors were well-known although there were one or two I hadn’t heard of.

    Thanks Eileen; nice to have all the links. Some of the GK I didn’t know, like LETT, VILLETTE and CAPOTE, but all fairly clued. I assumed Joyce Cary was a woman until I read your link.

    The crossword was doubly impressive in that all the novelists’ names had alternative meanings. Maybe I should try this with scientists …

20. What George Clements@1 said.

21. I enjoyed this puzzle a lot. My favourites were 21d and 12d.

    Thank you Eileen and Picaroon

22. Thanks Rog@18- yep – getting my Capotes and Capones muddled – how embarrassing!

23. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. My heart sank when I saw the theme because I have never been much of a reader of fiction (apart from some newspapers). When you spend most of your life reading either academic journals or badly written student work, reading for pleasure seems to lose its attraction. However, I thought this was very cleverly designed in a way that all themed clues could be solved with little knowledge of literature because all clues had a separate meaning. As others have said an excellent and enjoyable puzzle with lots of ingenious clues. Thanks again to Picaroon and Eileen.

24. Always good to see Picaroon’s name. So often there are complaints over themed puzzles leading to forced constructions but none of that here today I notice. Congratulations Picaroon!

25. What everyone has said with a small voice of dissent in that I think the clue for 16a unnecessarily uses a stereotype. Replacing “her” with “their” would have read just as well and made it gender neutral.
    Pick of the bountiful bunch for me were EDGE, HEAR, CHANDLER and NOVELISTS. I did get the theme after about 6 down solutions but it didn’t really help with the rest as the possibilities are endless so it was better just to solve the clues. It was only when I looked back at 11d that I realised what a neat clue it was!
    Thanks for another great puzzle Picaroon that once again shows they don’t have to be difficult to be entertaining, and thanks Eileen for another comprehensive blog with all the links. And to all contributors for a nice mix of comments on the puzzle and related topics.

26. I missed mentioning what was the cotd for me – FORESTER.

27. Loved it! Many thanks, Picaroon. What Albert would call “a” presumably depends on whether it’s nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, masculine, feminine, neuter etc. Lovely clue though. Also, is there anything specifically soldierly about a capote?

28. I’m another that can only echo GC’s perfect comment at #1.  Bravo.

29. … and if he were a manager he’d be Klopp.

30. Thank you Picaroon and Eileen.

    Lovely puzzle and theme – Paul could have had fun with CAPOTE…

    I wonder if this continual insistence on gender neutrality is counter productive, to me it seems to reinforce the notion  that females are inferior to males.

31. Loved it! Nothing more to say (except thanks to Picaroon and Eileen, of course)

32. Still confused as to by Balt is Lett?

33. Why goddamn it

34. Thanks much both.  I didn’t know ‘linenfold’ but it’s such a lovely, evocative word it sent me to google imaqes – most examples are wood panels and chairs but I thought this glass one beautiful.  Wish my linen shirts would behave like this … .

35. Oh dear, the link didn’t link – http://www.alisonkinnaird.com/glass-private-collectors-commissions/image/15.

36. NOVELISTS was FOI so this went rather quickly. I knew all the authors so that helped. I’ve still got a copy of The Horses Mouth by Joyce Cary-his first name was Arthur,by the way- with illustrations by John Bratby, so he was one of the first in. My LOI was DESTINY and I bet I’d have seen it more quickly!
    Thanks Picaroon
    Ps. There was a film of The Horses Mouth starring Robert -Long John Silver-Newton as Gully Jimson!

37. Malcolm@32 – Collins has Lett as an alternative to Latvian.

38. What I meant to say was I’d have seen DESTINY more quickly if this had been a Paul puzzle. Sorry!

39. Malcolm @32

    ‘Balt: a native or inhabitant of the Baltic states; a speaker of a Baltic language; a Lithuanian or Latvian’

    ‘Lett: a native or citizen of Latvia’

    Thank you, geof @34/35 – that’s beautiful.

     

40. Apologies, WhiteKing, for the crossing.

41. For a secon d or two I thought I had written in 21 ac incorrectly, as apparently in some dictionaries Culs de Sac is spelt Cul de Sacs..but thoroughly enjoyable. It goes to show that 4 letter clues can be just as challenging as longer ones, too…

42. Funny–I didn’t solve NOVELISTS until fairly late in the game.  When I put in STEIN–having already done TWAIN, WALKER, CHANDLER, and several others–I said to myself, “Gee–there’s a lot of writers here, where he’s deliberately avoiding cluing them that way.  Oh, duh–that’s the theme.”  A nice mix of American and British writers (and a Frenchwoman), with none that I hadn’t heard of (admittedly, several I haven’t read).

    Everything was fairly clued, and it was over too quickly. Thanks to Eileen and Picaroon.

    On the gender thing–I see the point, but men generally don’t do their nails, so “her” works fine in this clue.  In my experience, the few that bother with more than a pair of clippers (usually at home) are the kind of (stereotypically gay) men who have it done professionally.  I’ve never seen a man using a nail file.

43. …though I did have 1 Down as Bald until I realised the theme from 11 Down…

44. Excellent stuff.

    My capacity for missing themes is legendary, so thanks so much Picaroon for announcing this one at 11d. I had actually vaguely thought of Truman CAPOTE and Mark TWAIN when writing in those answers, but I completely failed to link the two and remained oblivious* to the theme until I got 11d. It became a bit easier after that! Thanks again, and to Eileen for the blog and links.

    *I don’t mean I had forgotten.

45. PS WhiteKing @25 – yes 16a uses a gender stereotype, but surely that’s why it works: by deliberately putting a certain (cliched) image in our minds.

46. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. Great fun. Besides not knowing LINENFOLD, my only problem was misreading “balt” as “bait” ( I was doing the puzzle near my bed time) so that I did not parse the Lett in VILLETTE. Certainly a novel experience.

47. Hi  Lord Jim@45 [and WhiteKing] – I also liked the way that a female novelist [well, the one that I was thinking of, anyway] was indirectly clued by ‘he exercises’ in 19dn.

48. Yes, Eileen @47, but SHE files her nails, while HE exercises command (and over 2 monarchs)

49. DaveMc @9:

    Americans used to get VD (well, some of us, anyway). Then we got STDs. For reasons that are not clear to me, the terminology now seems to be shifting to STIs.

50. CAPOTE as a garment is new to me and so are SNOW PEAS, but both gettable so they didn’t spoil the fun.

51. Late in the day, as I’m down in the south-west tip of the Fatherland on a partially wine-tasting holiday, I wish to add that I also found this puzzle brilliant, though I DNF, perhaps because of consuming too much Grauburgunder/pinot gris. Many thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

52. I’ll join in the praise for this puzzle. It took me a while to get NOVELISTS (it was FORESTER that gave me the hint I needed), and then the theme helped me to get FIELDING, CHANDLER and SAND.
    FORESTER was my stand-out clue (echoing other commenters). I also liked VILLETTE, CHANDLER, STEIN, FIELDING and CARY. Incorporating all those themewords in the grid was an impressive feat.
    Many thanks to Picaroon and to Eileen for the blog in general and for the trouble taken to provide the themed links.

53. Well and truly suckered as NOVELISTS was third last in. I thought there might be a twist.
    Bravissimo Picaroon and many thanks Eileen.

54. What’s to add? Great fun. I only picked up the theme by inadvertently reading the comments as I completed it online (for the first time). Loved STEIN & CARY in particular but ignorantly, have read neither of them.

55. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

    Believe it or not, I totally missed the theme (and was thus very puzzled by the definition in 11d!).

56. Incredibly, I spotted the theme before finishing the puzzle or getting 11.  TWAIN and ARCHER clued me in.

    I thought C.S. FORESTER spelt his name with two Rs, but not so. (Loved the &lit for that one).  With MEREDITH, I immediately thought of Burgess Meredith, confusing him with Anthony Burgess, thus mistakenly confirming my deduction of the theme.  My other senior moment came on solving FORD, recognising the author Ford Madox Ford and thinking “Oh, Three Men in a Boat!”

    Thanks for the fun, Picaroon and Eileen, particularly for all the links.  I didn’t know LINENFOLD or that the Encyclopaedia Britannica could be accessed online.

    (Captcha “one x one”!  Even I can do that.)

57. It’s muffin’s golf day…

    (captcha ? x nine = 81? bingo!)

58. Cookie @57

    Well remembered – I’d finished before golf, but the blog wasn’t up then! It wasn’t until I’d read it that I realised the obvious theme that I had missed.

    I think I’ve said before – once I’ve solved a clue and written it in, I usually forget about it – hence I miss themes.

59. So I was the only one to immediately solve 13a as ‘estonian’. S in Etonian ( I know it’s a push but I’ve seen worse) which slowed me down quite a lot as I couldn’t then solve Twain, Chandler or capote and of course novelist. In fact I thought down solutions was going to refer to calming drugs.
    So imagine how pleased I was to unpick my error and complete it in the end.

60. phitonelly @56

    I googled LINENFOLD and that came up – I do like to give links to other sites than Wikipedia when I can and found several of the NOVELISTS on the EB page, as you can see.

61. Ted @49 –

    Your comment about VD triggered a recollection from the earliest years of Saturday Night Live, when they did an intentionally over-the-top skit about a “VD Caseworker” that included a public announcement over the intercom at a high school basketball game, and then an article printed in the local newspaper, warning that a certain student at the high school “has venereal disease” … which, by the end of the skit, turned out to be an erroneous diagnosis.  In my Google search I couldn’t find a (free) video copy of it, but I did find a site containing the printed script for the skit.  Reading the script all these years after it aired — 40 years ago this month (!!) — I can see it was pretty edgy stuff (as SNL was, back in the 1970s) . . . and also not very PC by today’s standards, even though it was obviously self-mocking in tone . . . but I recall that my high school self found it to be pretty funny in 1978, and well-acted by the talented original SNL cast members. 

62. WhiteKing @25

    “What everyone has said with a small voice of dissent in that I think the clue for 16a unnecessarily uses a stereotype. Replacing “her” with “their” would have read just as well and made it gender neutral.”

    Is this ironical or are you just taking the p***?

    You’ve actually ruined the whole puzzle for me as I now see just how offensive it actually is. 🙁

     

63. It seems that we need to know names of constellations not only in Latin but also in English…

64. Late correction, for the record, to PA @36: it was not Newton as Jimson in the film of The Horse’s Mouth, but Alec Guinness – possibly influenced by Newton after their work together in Oliver Twist. Newton died before the Cary film was made. The copy of the book with Bratby illustrations was presumably a ‘film edition’, since Bratby did the on-screen paintings.

65. Thanks lurkio and every one else who commented on my post. Clearly there is a wide range of perspectives on this topic and this forum isn’t the right one to do justice to exploring them. Maybe at an S&B event?

66. Keep on keeping on, WhiteKing. The Guardian has confirmed that the crossword is as much bound by house rules as any other part of the paper, so any perceived infelicities are especially worthy of comment.  It is also amusing when one of the dinosaurs is flushed out of the undergrowth taking great offence about any suggestion that others have taken offence.

67. muffin@55 — I thought nobody else could possibly miss the theme after solving all the clues including 11d from the (telegraphed) anagram, but I see I have company!

    Peter Aspinwall @36  I saw the film of The Horse’s Mouth with Alec Guinness in the late 50’s.  It was wonderful.

    Gladys @50 You must not go to Chinese restaurants, where SNOW PEAS are a common component of many dishes, usually presented as such on the menu — “Chicken with snow peas,” say.  Or are they called something different where you live?

    Thanks to Picaroon for a magnificent puzzle and to Eileen as ever for a delightful blog.

68. Re Horses Mouth. Thanks to those who pointed out my error re the film version. Indeed it was Guinness who played Jimson. I can still see Newton in my head in the fantasy sequence but that’s my problem. My copy of the book is the Folio Society edition so isn’t really a film edition.
    Cheers all.

69. Late coming to this one (in fact I did Thursday’s Pan before this) since I had no paper or internet access yesterday.  No matter – excellent from Pickers and a worthy atonement for the mix-up of two weeks ago! (Still not convinced by the explanations but won’t say any more).

    Indeed getting so many 11d’s into each and every down clue – and still having decent words in the across lights – now if only us lesser mortals could pull that off!  A few unknowns for me: LINENFOLD, CAPOTE (other than the name), and SNOW PEAS I wasn’t sure about though it rings a bell (I thought it was a synonym of SNOWBERRY, which we have growing rampant in our garden – but apparently not.  Don’t try eating the latter, btw!).  But these unusual words are all fairly clued.

    So I cannot fault this one.  Medium-to-tough I would say, but emphatically do-able.  Many thanks, late in the day, to Picaroon and Eileen.

    Now to go to Pan…

     

70. btw “snow peas” is the American name for mangetout (we seem not have have an English name!)

71. I’m late commenting again, first because I’m a day behind in my crosswords, and second because Eileen’s generous links took me down so may side-streets that I quite lost track of time. What a delightful puzzle. May I add another WOW to DaveMc’s four? I echo Trailman’s marveling at how Picaroon could create a themed puzzle with no infelicitous clueing needed to accommodate the theme – not an awkward clue in the bunch. COD was FORESTER. This was also one of the more enjoyable blogs to read through; little carping, much friendliness and lots of interesting comments. Thanks Picaroon, Eileen and everyone else.

72. Superb crossword as has been said.

    I do hope that setters will not pander to those who try to erase fond memories and visions of the past and the freedom to use the most appropriate words.

     

73. Doesn’t 11dn say it all? (A ‘WIWD’ clue).

    Many thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

    [a little saddened by Mr Penney’s doubly phobic comment. I am neither gay nor female but have always filed my nails. Perhaps he has never worn wool or caressed lovers?]

Comments are closed.