Listener 4868: Robbed by Cagey

Did Cagey holiday in Pembrokeshire recently? Your blogger did and …

went to Solva Woollen Mill (splendid place!), where amongst the cushions and rugs and coffee and cakes were books by illustrator Jackie Morris, who lives nearby. Readers who have solved the puzzle will see where this is leading. One of her books, co-authored with Robert MacFarlane, is The Lost Words, an attractive and thoughtful exploration of 20 words that people of Dash’s generation grew up with but might be barely known to the children of today, and which were dropped from the Oxford Junior English Dictionary in 2007:

Acorn, Adder, Bluebell, Bramble, Conker, Dandelion, Fern, Heather, Heron, Ivy, Kingfisher, Lark, Magpie, Newt, Otter, Raven, Starling, Weasel, Willow, and Wren

Did Cagey see the list, do the inveterate setter’s thing of counting the letters, seeing they fitted nicely into a rectangular grid – and get out his squared paper?

But there you have it: discover the book in question, write those words into the grid and the title below, and the job is done.

Now we’ll confess, once we’d solved a sprinkling of clues and ACORN BLUEBELL AND BRAMBLE had appeared something subliminal clicked in as we did holiday year Solva last year and saw the book, and Googling “book with two authors acorn bluebell bramble” spilled the beans.

So was this just a gimme? Far from it. While a few folk might just see the shortcut and not go back and work it out properly, they would miss an amazing feat of clue construction and fail to appreciate a really fine puzzle (not a surprise from a former POTY winner), although it would be better if the back door wasn’t there.

The clue to the clues is the puzzling phrase in the preamble that in across clues “the definitions have been affected in accordance with a thematic work”, which made no sense at all first. If The Book Thief, we thought, had had two authors, that would be the theme, and that set us thinking that the definitions had been ROBBED away – and we tried to solve them as wordplay only clues. They were hard, and if we hadn’t spotted the shortcut and been able to back-solve them we’d have been struggling.

What that blinded us to was that the alternative solutions to some of the clues, treating them as normal with a definition, which we’d had to abandon as red herrings were part of a whole shoal of them in which all the across clues could be solved in both ways. So for instance

“Parent, doctor and one to finish with, curate” [now why did Dash pick that one??] gave both

PADRE: def. “curate” PA DR (on)E

and

MAGPIE: no def. MA GP I (curat)E

Making all that work was a wonder – and no wonder that the clues were tricky to solve in the first place. The order of the clues was the alphabetical order of the red herring answers: AMY FACE FOE FOX LEA INTERESECT LEAR LURE MANAGE OPT PADRE PALS PEARL POD ROAD SHED TEAR TOAST TRAIN WORK

Jumbling the down clues, with welcome guidance as to the letter order from the wordplay, was necessary to allow the very specific sequence of acrosses to be maintained and worked well as a device. We were pleased to note that some VIN provided by 17d “Beaujolais perhaps, Vaslav Nijinsky’s partiality? (3)” (wordplay giving VNI was perhaps the dancer’s initials + I for me as statement of partiality?).  Cagey can keep his place in the Oenophiles Club. So cheers to him, and thanks for an enjoyable puzzle.

NB As always full parsing is available on listenercrossword. com