Spook by Henri

Here is Henri’s puzzle for the York S&B

Spook by Henri

The preamble:

‘Eight clues contain an extra word; select the letter in the word that corresponds to the word’s position in its clue. In order, selected letters indicate what must be highlighted (12 cells), which in turn will assist in entering six undefined thematic answers.’

As usual with puzzles involving extra words etc, we set out to solve as many ‘normal’ clues as possible in order to tease out the hidden instruction and thematic entries.  We expect barred puzzles to contain some unusual words – and this one had more than its fair share, plus several clues requiring fairly specialist general knowledge – we had to check words in the clue or the definition for 1, 6, 10, 13, 15, 17, 19, 23, 27, 32 & 33 across and 5, 9, 16, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26 & 28 down – half the clues! Perhaps this shows a lack of knowledge on our part, but it did make the puzzle a serious challenge.

However, as all but four of the across clues turned out to be ‘normal’, we managed to fill much of the grid with a lot of help from Chambers and search engines. With the crossers in place, we tried to figure out 22d and decided that it had to be one of the six clues without definitions. We realised that a reversal of CHINOOK would fit, and the penny dropped when we noticed ‘PUT THE WIND UP’ in the diagonal FROM the P in the bottom left cell TO the P in the top right – the letters in the extra words, as highlighted in green below. This also explained the puzzle title. We looked for the names of other winds that we knew, and realised that MISTRAL fitted into 1d, and FOEHN at 3d, but we had to search for the other three, which were new to us.