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Twin fills the Tuesday slot this week.
Tuesday is usually ‘theme day’ in the Indy – it took us a while to tumble to this week’s theme as we struggled with the top half of the grid. However, once we had 18d and 27ac we were on the lookout for appropriate thematic entries – there are of course myriad potential words from their catalogue, not to mention Harrison and Starr. So we were rather disappointed to find that the only entries were 1ac, 5ac, 29ac and most of 30ac – and even then we’re missing ‘Club Band’.
Sorry Twin, we felt this was a missed opportunity but are we perhaps missing something?
ANT (worker) with SERGE (material) in front or ‘to the left’
PPE (protective clothing) in PER (a)
A (American) LONG (pine)
An anagram (‘barmy’) of ARMY IS ILL
ENTER (come into) TIN (money) outside (‘without’) A
PLUM (‘suspect professor – in ‘Cluedo’) E (European)
GAT (gun) round or ‘filled with’ D (dead) and a reversal (’round’) of EG (‘say’)
D (first letter or ‘head’ of dinosaur) + an anagram (‘off’) of IT COMES
MEMBER (politician) after or ‘going on’ RE (about)
BUs missing the last letter or ‘nearly’ round or ‘covering’ UREA (waste)
CA (circa – ‘about’) NON (French for ‘no’ – ‘turn-down’)
ANy missing the last letter or ‘almost’ and TUCK (food) in or ‘stocked by’ NET (web)
MCC (cricket team based at Lord’s – ‘Lord’s people’) + an anagram (‘dancing’) of AREN’T + Y (unknown)
A homophone (‘audience’s’) of FAZE (worry)
LONdon (‘half of capital’) ELY (city)
HEAR (catch) TIES (ropes)
SC (namely) AVENGER (Hawkeye – apparently one of the superheroes in The Avengers)
ROT (go off) round or ‘eating’ OS (outsize – ‘large’)
We needed some help with this one – it had to be EN GARDE with the crossing letters, but the parsing is apparently zEN GARDEn (area of monastery) missing the first and last letters, or ‘cutting edge’ – too obscure for us!
A reversal (‘elevated’) of AN + SCAR (‘feature of Harry Potter’)
ELLIPSis (…) missing ‘is’ + E (base)
ROUE (libertine) in PITT (Prime Minister in the 18th century) + E (energy)
A reversal (‘reflecting’) of E (English) MY (setter’s) HR (Human Resources – ‘team at work’)
MEN (people) TO R (river)
DO (finish) MINI (skirt) CAN (may) – the WI being the West Indies
Dracula’s title is count – so anyone who was ‘unlike’ him could be described as COUNTLESS
LEON (‘hitman filmed’ – in the film by Luc Besson) round or ‘adopting’ N (new) N (name)
M (first or ‘initial’ letter of metaphor) + an anagram (‘edited’) of LONGER
USURER (Shylock, say) round or ‘claiming’ P (power)
Hidden (‘measure of’) in frENZY MEans
CAMELot (legendary place) missing ‘OT’ (Old Testament – ‘books’)
K (king) HAZIer (not as clear) missing ‘er’ (queen)
Excellent puzzle. Loved it, especially 1d: sc.(ilicet) AVENGER.
Found it tough but very enjoyable.
My top faves: PEPPER, NANTUCKET, SCAVENGER, EN GARDE (took ages to see the parsing) and KHAZI.
Thanks Twin and B&J.
Not an anniversary then, it seems. Anyway I made a mess of it, spelling Paul as Mac (especially embarrassing for a cricket follower) and wondering what Dominican had to do with the Women’s Institute. I’m going away to hide in a large glass of Shiraz.
Today’s faves for me inc PEPPER, PLUME, MCCARTNEY, PIROUETTE, MONGREL and USURPER. Like our bloggers, I wondered if there was something I missed, theme-wise, given this setter’s track record. I thought ‘WI member’ slightly stretched for an individual inhabitant rather than a state and as for both ‘part of monastery’ = ZEN GARDEN and ‘team at work’ = HR, I was never within a million miles of spotting either of those.
Thanks Twin and B&J
Lots of fun – I liked the suspect professor.
I think 17d works better if you take Dracula as the book title rather than the character’s name; a book without a Count in it would be count-less.
Sheesh! That was way tough. Got stuck and needed a friend’s help to finish it off although we didn’t get the parsing for EN GARDE and he needed to explain which Claudius was a usurper, which I had entered from the wordplay. The theme was needed to get LENNON. Everyone knows that murder victim is always Abel except, apparently, when it isn’t.
Quirister@5
COUNTLESS
Yours is a better explanation. Thanks.
I found this puzzle very hard work, with, I’m afraid, not the pay-off that I hoped for, on so many of the clues.
Not so much, “aha moments”, as “oh, is that it then?”
The likes of 15(d), DOMINICAN, and 25(ac) NANTUCKET, sum this crossword up. Contrived clues with boring solutions. The theme is bizarre, and slightly tasteless, as re John Lennon. I suppose that “hearties” to reference “hearts” (30ac) might suit some solvers, but it is, for me,
not up to scratch.
It’s things like “the same way” = SIMILARLY, in 10ac, that frustrate me. The same way is “identically”, similarly is “resembling”/ ” nearly the same”.
EN GARDE, 3d, remains beyond me: so clever……or simply not?
Not a solver I am familiar with: fingers crossed, the next Twin will suit me more. Sorry for a grumpy old man post this time.
thanks for the blog, BJ, & Ms.Q, for the Dracula parse, which escaped me, ditto Frankie@1, for the “sc” re 1(d).
Just not my day, was it?
The other thematic element to this was that many of us needed a little help from our friends to (get by) solve and parse it.
Me@9 Sorry if B and J and/ or Hovis had already subtly made the same joke.
I didn’t think of the joke but am wishing I had.
PM @4: I know you rarely cycle back through, but DOMINICAN could conceivably be not a person from Dominica but the Dominican Republic itself, which is often called just “the Dominican” for short. That would give the setter some cover. The problem is that while it of course is in the West Indies, they don’t send players to the WI cricket side (it’s very firmly a baseball country–baseball is like a religion there). So you can decide whether that’s good enough to work for “WI member.”
Or–a member of the WI cricket team might be a person from Dominica (there probably have been a few over the years, although it’s one of the less-populous of those islands), so it could work that way too.
Only finished this with a lot of guess work, and many I couldn’t even begin to parse.
Thanks both. Perhaps my worst ever attempt today, so it’s difficult to be positive. The LENNON MCCARTNEY combo would ordinarily have greatly engaged me but to clue one as just a knight and the other a murder victim along with a nho film character felt evasive with so little else contributing to the theme apparently. I am still unsure if NASCAR is by definition a sport, or the organisation running it.
My first pass-through, I got ALONG and SIMILARLY, but nothing else. After that, it was like carving Mt. Rushmore. Ever so slowly, a word here and a word there, until critical mass was achieved (block that metaphor!), but the theme didn’t come to me until the very end. The whole thing was a top-notch challenge, but I only have the frankness to say that, because I ultimately conquered it.
Thank you, Twin!
Way too late for this thought but only just finished this.
For en garde I just had en=in and then garden missing its edge as surely it would need to have been missing edges if ’twere zen garden.