Listener 4846 Malined Work by Hypnos

A welcome return to the Listener by Hypnos, aka Slueth and Shamus and indeed Phlip Marlow in the Church Times under his own name (spot the references to his near-namesake investigator) … I wonder what we will be investigating this time. Mechlin Lace? Probably not. A darker theme perhaps. Something MALIGN? But why no G?

There was nothing too daunting in the preamble though. Those extra letters in wordplay were going to spell how we would reveal the theme (a ‘mali(g)ned work’?) and a name associated with it, then we would hunt for a ring of six cells to highlight showing a main character’s name. There was a fine hint ‘All but two final grid entries are real words or phrases.’ That prompted us that something was going to change in the grid though we weren’t sure how it would “reveal” the theme – an anagram perhaps (mal-lined?), as indeed proved to be the case. (One of us also got in a tiz about how the associated name was revealed in the grid, but it was there just for info – or did we miss something important?)

We could hardly believe our luck when two further generous anagrams gave POSTSCRIPTS and FLIRTATIOUS on the top and bottom rows. Hypnos’ clues were relatively kind too, with some like ‘What made elite sandwiches – this (4)’ perfect gifts (the DELI, of course, giving an additional wordplay E). There were a few stinkers too, mind. DNESTR (non-dictionary Russian spelling of a Ukrainian river took ages to verify, and some of the synonyms needed to be found which also generated extra letters were quite a hunt; but there were nice twists as well like ‘Venetian parts’ giving SLAT(e)S. Soon it was possible to extrapolate ANAGRAM OF FIRST COLUMN and surprisingly, HEROIC and TEXTS gave THE EXORCIST. What about that F at the bottom of the column? Aaah, penny drops – the next set of extra letters spell BAR LAST LETTER, so we can forget the F.

Two things left to find and, of course, Wiki comes to the rescue. W FRIEDKIN was the film’s director. That explains that rather odd set of letters at the end, and now we can see why that bundle of Zs appeared in the south-east corner of the grid. PAZUZU (honestly? A Mesopotian wind-demon it seems) was the main character, if we can call him/it that.

In goes THE EXORCIST, creating real words. We wondered for a moment what the two final entries that were not real words were going to be but, of course, they now appeared in that left hand column.

Gentle and fun. Thank you, Hypnos. And yes, you retain your membership of the Oenophile Club (which Dash who has inherited this blog from the Numpties and Vagans will continue to keep open) with TEAS as long as we can slip our usual tipple into them.