Dave Hennings’ crossword data-base tells me that we have already met Cranberry ten times in EV and Inquisitor crosswords but it seems that this is his (her or their) first Listener crossword.It soon becomes evident that we are solving an ‘eightsome reels’ crossword with extra letters produced by the wordplay of those eight-letter answers, the extra letters being placed in the central cells of the reels which will go ‘clockwise or anticlockwise, starting anywhere’.
There is more to come: that word (odious to this Numpty) ‘jumbled’ which is to apply to all the other answers and we are going to hunt for four two-word phrases that we will remove before solving. These will give us partial hints about how to group the sixteen reel answers, producing ‘fragments’ that we will group below the grid.
This is tough as we have to solve those sixteen reel clues but need to disentangle the other jumbled clues in order to manage our entries and these are not the ‘solved this as the froth on my beer settled’ type of clue. Happily, for example, the letters ??WOHRUESER appear at 10 across and TEA (oh yes, I use it copiously) suggests only one anagrammed ‘insect eater’ the SHREWMOUSE, placing an M and S of TRANSMIT – and so it goes, with unusual words like GRUTCH, TUSHED, SIDDUR, GOGLETS and HERL. (Mind you the other half of Dash tells me he gave a squeal of delight at the clue to SHREWMOUSE: “Insect eater heard in East End drug den? (10)”: ” SHROOM ‘OUSE”, despite sharing my dislike of jumbles which he feels makes solving like doing a Sudoku.)
But what a delight when ONLY CONNECT appears on row 2, soon to be followed by PROSE and PASSION, BOTH EXALTED – those things, the disparate fragments that Margaret Schegel wanted to connect in HOWARDS END (a favourite novel of this Numpty, my crossword, IQ 1932, appeared in the Inquisitor series in the i just five months ago). The forty-five cells to highlight are evident but what about the fragments?
Those two-word hints take some finding but what fun when they split up HO-WAR-D-SEND
