Listener 4914: Figures of Fun by Serpent

Serpent’s second Listener – his first was 4408 Child’s Play – but his 16^th in Dave Hennings’ database, dating back 11 years. The themes range widely (4408 was based on ‘Snakes and Ladders’ but the last EV was about Roman Emperors) – so what will we have this time?

We are presented with a carte blanche with 180 degree symmetry. Why are no bars shown? Something is afoot in the grid, and some trial entries at its top soon showed that no clued acrosses are in the top line. The preamble tells us that 5 entries are unclued, two giving the theme and three containing thematic material in 14 cells, some characters of which need to be put into lower case. The first letters of extra words in 29 clues will point to the theme.

We start solving in earnest, and despite Serpents’ nom de guerre (and seniority as the Times crossword editor and Magpie Hon Editor) the clues proved fair, tractable and pretty conventional – so progress was quick. A breakthrough came when SUR QUA appeared in the clue message. A serach on Google on “sure quatre”, which looked like the most obvious expansion, gave two likely options: Georges Braque’s lithograph Sur 4 Murs and Robert Schumann’s  Carnaval. Wikipedia’s account of the latter was our next port of call which gave the musica themes on which it was based as AEsCh – AsCH – EsCHA: and by now we had AEsCH in the top left hand corner of our grid. And as the three ‘words’ have 14 letters between them, that was to be our highlighted material, with the words containing the other two in the middle and bottom left to satisfy the symmetry requirment. A bit of puzzling and they emerged as AESCHYLUS, MARASCHINO and SENESCHAL as the only words that would fit with such other leyyers as we had already got. Very neat indeed.

With those in place and the extra words deduced from the emerging message SCENES MIGNONNES SUR QUATRE NOTES (Carnaval’s subtitle) the rest of the fill roared along, and CARNAVAL and SCHUMANN duly appeared as the other unclued words in the outer columns.

By now we were in awe of the construction – and all done without stupid levels of complication or the dreaded jumbles – but also somewhat embarrassed that we had clearly solved the puzzle back to front, after our lucky hit on the theme. Time to check back through the clues and answers though to make sure we hadn’t zoomed on too quickly, and all seemed well except that we weren’t sure about “Accountant’s projection has gone through to auditor (4)” with ?OSE as the pattern and either “Accountant” or “auditor” as the extra word. We plumped for the former since “gone through to the auditor” reads like the wordplay for a homophone, and “projection” like the definition, most probably NOSE, but – here’s the rub – just possibly ROSE. (Chambers 9: A circular moulding from which eg a door-handle projects). ROWS? ROES? (“ROSE” from RISE doesn’t really mean “has gone through” and the convention is for a homophone not homonym anyway). So back to NOSE, and the only available homophone is KNOWS. We suppose someone who “has gone through” something “knows” it (Chambers 3:  To be familiar with from having learned or experienced) but it’s not a very good equivalence. We call a truce and feel that NOSE must be right and maybe there is a better justification for it) (and maybe there isn’t).

Well, that did go on a bit… so quickly back to the clues and a general cheer for sound construction with enviously good surface readings, nearly all of which pass the “overheard in the bar” test. It’s still just Lent so I suppose the “tea and coffee (not instant)” will have to do, but wait a moment – there is MARASCHINO right in the centre of the grid unclued so we’ll still hope to enjoy Serpent’s company in the Listener Oenophile Club after all as soon as it’s Easter.