Guardian 27,045 / Vlad

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Vlad at his trickiest! With a completely empty grid after my first pass through the clues I thought I was going to struggle with this one, and so it proved, but I got there in the end without having to resort to the ‘reveal all’ option.

With hindsight, I cannot see why I didn’t solve some of the clues during my first pass because they now seem so obvious (perhaps I wasn’t fully awake at the time) but there again this is what good cryptic cluing is all about, stating the obvious without it being so. Thanks Vlad for the mental challenge!

Across
9 Clobber dealer senseless following acrimonious face-off (9)
OUTFITTER – OUT (senseless) F (following) [b]ITTER (acrimonious face-off)

10 Poet‘s sound recording (5)
NOYES – sounds like (recording) ‘noise’ (sound)

11 Mate sheepishly, with hurt expression, getting caught — perfect! (5,2)
TOUCH UP – TUP (mate sheepishly) around (with … getting caught) OUCH (hurt expression)

12,3 Upstarts originally in costly house in our avenue — outrageous! (7,5)
NOUVEAU RICHE – I[n] C[ostly] H[ouse] (originally in costly house) in an anagram (outrageous) of OUR AVENUE

13 Busy day — lawyer’s going ape (4)
COPY – COP (busy {policeman}) [da]Y (day – lawyer’s going)

14 Where royal profile is / exactly right (2,3,5)
ON THE MONEY – double def.

16 Damaged the cart’s wheel? Maybe (7)
RATCHET – an anagram (damaged) of THE CART

17 Monkey, one protected by higher species? (7)
HANUMAN – AN (one) in (protected by) HUMAN (higher species)

19 One spotted crossing road asleep, so needing treatment (10)
LEOPARDESS – an anagram (needing treatment) of ASLEEP SO around (crossing) RD (road)

22 Recalled nice landlady serving Guinness? (4)
ALEC – hidden (serving) reversal (recalled) in ‘niCE LAndlady’

24 Deny making tour of women’s prison earlier (7)
NEWGATE – NEGATE (deny) around (making tour of) W (women)

25 New entrant soft on crime (7)
INCOMER – an anagram (soft) of ON CRIME

26 Set aside vote? That’s not British (5)
ALLOT – [b]ALLOT (vote? That’s not British)

27 Strip by Dutch male isn’t fantastic (9)
DISMANTLE – D (Dutch) plus an anagram (fantastic) of MALE ISN’T

Down
1 Unitarian school disciplined statesman (5,10)
SOUTH CAROLINIAN – an anagram (disciplined) of UNITARIAN SCHOOL

2 Courtesan in play treated with affection (8)
STRUMPET – STRUM (play {a guitar etc}) PET (treated with affection {adjective})

4 Set about working in mine — hurry! (4,2,2)
STEP ON IT – an anagram (about) of SET plus ON (working) in PIT (mine)

5 Pull young lady? Get right in! (6)
WRENCH – R (right) in (get … in) WENCH (young lady)

6 Undoing of woman last month involving the opposite sex (9)
ANNULMENT – ANN (woman) plus ULT (last month) around (involving) MEN (the opposite sex {to woman})

7 Legendary flier‘s the reason fantasy writer gets mentioned (6)
WYVERN – sounds like (gets mentioned) ‘why’ (the reason) ‘Verne’ (fantasy writer {Jules Verne})

8 Detective story — read end! (1,5,2,7)
A STUDY IN SCARLET – a den (a study) in red (scarlet) gives ‘re a den d’ or, changing the spacing, ‘read end’

15 Has to keep English in very poor game (9)
PHEASANTS – HAS around E (English) in PANTS (very poor)

17 Is linked by time? That’s extremely premature (8)
HASTIEST – HAS TIES (is linked) T (time)

18 Dog getting a stomach upset when man’s out (8)
MALAMUTE – MALE (man) around (when … ‘s out) A TUM reversed (upset)

20 Killer, some say with previous, was falsely arrested (6)
OSWALD – OLD (previous) around (arrested) an anagram (falsely) of WAS

21 About to cut the old man’s hair (6)
DREADS – RE (about) in (to cut) DAD’S (the old man’s)

23 Queen involved in dishonest behaviour? Get outta here! (5)
SCRAM – R (queen) in (involved in) SCAM (dishonest behaviour)

52 comments on “Guardian 27,045 / Vlad”

  2. Isnt A study in scarlet more of a rebus sorta clue rather than well cryptic.. .. i did play around with something in something.. but didnt think to split it as above..

  3. Thanks Vlad and Gaufrid
    I found it a bit easier than a typical Vlad, though I didn’t parse OUTFITTER, COPY or A STUDY IN SCARLET. OSWALD (LOI) was my favourite.

  4. Getting to like Vlad more these days. Thanks to him and, of course, to Gaufrid. Thought 8d was excellent (and is a great story too). A couple of minor quibbles….. why should ‘D’ be an abbreviation for ‘Dutch’ in 27a, and can any old word now be used as an anagrind (‘soft’ in 25a)?

    Very enjoyable!

  5. Vlad’s puzzles are always a great pleasure, and I loved this. Couldn’t parse A STUDY IN SCARLET or COPY; favourites were STRUMPET, DREADS, LEOPARDESS and OSWALD. Hadn’t heard of MALAMUTE but it couldn’t be anything else. Many thanks to Vlad and Gaufrid.

  6. Thank you, Gaufrid, I couldn’t quite unravel the parsing of the long 8d.

    Enjoyed this with ticks at OUTFITTER; TOUCH UP; COPY (favourite); & ALEC.

    Not so keen on wheel for RATHCHET or soft as an anagrind.

    Just stopped myself griping about the tense of pet in the STRUMPET clue, where I thought the tense was wrong.

    Like Aoxomoxoa @4, I’m warming to this setter and don’t inwardly groan on seeing his name any longer.

    Many thanks, Qaos, nice weekend, all.

  7. Interestingly (possibly) A STUDY IN SCARLET went in at 1 across in yesterday’s Times so maybe Vlad composed both puzzles.

  8. Thanks, Gaufrid.

    I agree with baerchen re OSWALD – and among the not too shabby ones I picked out OUTFITTER, LEOPARDESS, PHEASANTS and ALEC. I really love the surface of NOUVEAU RICHE – but shouldn’t it be plural [or the definition singular]?

    NOYES went straight in [he usually appears in crossword with a play on NO/YES] because he’s the first real poet I came across, in primary school, with his stirring ‘The Highwayman’.

    Aoxomoxoa @4 – both Collins and Chambers give D for Dutch and Collins gives ‘silly’ for soft [I remember using that as a child].

    Many thanks to Vlad for a good challenge to start the day.

  9. Eileen @8 I was going to make the same comment on NOUVEAU RICHE but decided that it is already a plural noun (even though not written NOUVEAUX RICHES) meaning, “those people recently come into money”.

  10. I only got a couple or so on my first pass through which is all I expected then one thing led to another. I didnt do any fancy parsing in 8 as I had enough crossers and I thought READ/RED/SCARLET QED.
    I thought all the clues were top rate .Great puzzle well blogged. Ta!

  11. Enjoyable, though for me, quite a few of my solutions were intuitive guesses rather than logically parsed at the time.

    Thanks to Vlad for the challenge and to Gaufrid for helping me to understand the whys and wherefores.

    Appreciate discussion on the forum of some of the quibbles others had. For me, the to-Ing and fro-ing adds to the interest of the whole solving experience.

    I did get a pleasant buzz from these solves among others: 10a NOYES, 22a ALEC and 7d WYVERN.

  12. It’s a wavelength thing. I’ve struggled this week with setters I usually find easier and then breezed through Vlad, who usually impales me!
    I failed to parse the very clever 8d, so thanks Gaufrid for the blog and Vlad for an excellent puzzle.

  13. Why is the clue for 8d (which I guessed straight away from the word count and worked out later) considered “not cryptic”?

    As usual, retired defeated by Vlad, but I did enjoy TOUCH UP and ON THE MONEY.

  14. I didn’t find Vlad quite as ‘impaling’ as usual but I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.

    A Study in Scarlet is obviously “setter’s book of the week” – having had it in yesterday’s Times, as soon as I saw the enumeration and the Y at the end of 14a it just wrote itself in.

    Thanks to Vlad and Gaufrid too.

  15. Thank you Vlad and Gaufrid.

    An enjoyable puzzle, but I failed to parse a few of the answers, COP (busy {policeman})?

    Is not 17a an &lit?, HANUMAN monkeys are treated like gods, at least at temples to Hanuman in India, and there is a law protecting them.

  17. I usually struggle to get on Vlad’s wavelength, but this time I did so from the start, so it went fairly smoothly though not particularly quickly. The only one I couldn’t parse was A STUDY IN SCARLET (a bit too convoluted for my brain). D as an abbreviation for Dutch was new to me, but I confirmed it at dictionary.com. Too many favourites to list them all, but WYVERN gave me the biggest “Ah!” moment.

    Thanks, Vlad and Gaufrid.

  18. Thanks Vlad and Gaufrid.

    As Gaufrid said, pretty tricky to get started on this but enjoyable.

    Isn’t 16 the wrong way around; wheel is not an example of ratchet but vice versa?

  19. I’m sorry, but I still don’t see A STUDY IN SCARLET. “Read end” accounts for eight letters — how do you get the rest?

  20. Valentine @ 19

    Read it as R A DEN ED = SCAR A STUDY LET, hence ‘A DEN IN RED’, or ‘A STUDY IN SCARLET’.

    hth

  21. That was a pretty tough workout but as always from Vlad full of wit and invention> If I had to pick a favourite it would be PHEASANTS. MALAMUTE was new to me, OSWALD last in.

    Thanks to Vlad and Gaufrid

  24. My thoughts were almost exactly those of Gaufred although I’m sure he was quicker than I was. I found the SW corner the most tricky, although,looking at the puzzle again,I’m not sure why. I should’ve got LEOPARDESS easily and DREADS and ALLOT were,in retrospect, excellent. LOI NEWGATE.
    It seems we’re all getting used to this setter.
    Thanks Vlad.

  25. Thanks to Vlad and Gaufrid. Unlike others above I found this Vlad puzzle as difficult as previous ones, so that my first pass yielded very few answers and then I struggled. I could not parse A STUDY IN SCARLET (though the crossers certainly helped), did not know HANUMAN, and was defeated by COPY (though MALAMUTE was familiar to me). A challenge.

  26. Never heard of malamute nor hanuman. Happily Ms. Bradford did! Fabulous parse of read end. Didn’t get it until we read the blog. Thanks to everyone.

  27. 8d was great. I guessed the answer long before the penny finally dropped for the wordplay. Brilliant.

    I’m still a bit uneasy about PET = “treated with affection” in 2d. Chambers gives “adj, kept as a pet, indulged”, so I suppose it’s ok. But while you can have a black cat and a pet cat, you can say “the cat was black” but not “the cat was pet”.

  31. muffin and jennyk I read pet as in the sense of “he was her pet student” = “he was the student she treated with affection”.

    This was a real struggle for me also owing not only to the clues but also my lack of general knowledge. Hanuman, busy/cop, malumate, Noyes and Newgate prison were all unknowns. I also didn’t see soft as an anagram indicator. As a result many answers were of through intuition as Julie in Australia describes.

    My favourite clue was ALEC until reading this blog and seeing how clever A STUDY IN SCARLET is, which I had entered based on word count and a guess based on “read” = study.

  33. Superb puzzle. Lots of great clues but I particularly liked A STUDY IN SCARLET, ALEC and the beautifully elegant COPY. Thanks to Vlad and Gaufrid.

  34. Very enjoyable – a well-crafted puzzle with some ingenuity thrown in.

    8d A STUDY IN SCARLET was the second clue I looked at (after 1d) and my first in. I was lucky – it is a story I know well and it came to me just from seeing ‘(1,5,2,7)’. The parsing was straightforward after that, but I would never have got the answer from the wordplay. Clever stuff. By contrast, I found the anagram at 1d much more difficult and tried both NORTH… and SOUTH… before I forced the answer out with the latter.

    I had a bit of trouble in a previous Vlad puzzle with anagram indicators, and I didn’t register ‘soft’ in the clue to 25a INCOMER as one, even though the answer more or less had to be an anagram. I’m sure some-one will come up with the requisite mental imagery (and no doubt ‘soft’ is in the Chambers Crossword Dictionary as a possible anagrind!).

    I didn’t understand ‘cop’ = ‘busy’ in 13a COPY, but apart from that this was a challenging and enjoyable experience, giving me two new words to learn: HANUMAN and MALAMUTE. I particularly liked 24a NEWGATE, 14a ON THE MONEY, 7d WYVERN and 20d OSWALD. It was also good to see a change from the NO/YES wordplay for 10a NOYES.

    Many thanks to Vlad and Gaufrid.

  35. @Alan B
    “soft” isn’t one of the 857 anagrinds in the Chambers appendix, but “malleable” is, so it seems fair dinkum to me (but I would say that, wouldn’t I?:))

  36. Alan B and baerchen, Eileen @8 points out that Collins gives “silly” for soft, so does the COED – and I also remember it being used as a child, “don”t be soft” meaning “don’t be silly”.

  37. baerchen @35
    Yes, that will do! I can see ‘soft’ = ‘malleable’, and it’s only a small step to ‘hammered’, which is a violent anagram indicator if ever there was one. Thanks.

  38. Cookie @36
    Thanks for your input on this as well. I had seen Eileen’s comment (I remember what she said about NOYES, because he was my ‘first real poet’ too!), but I clearly missed her mention of ‘soft’ = ‘silly’ in 25a – so my apologies to her.
    [Btw, I added a late post to the Qaos puzzle on the 15th.)

  39. Cookie @36
    ‘.. I also remember it being used as a child, “don”t be soft” meaning “don’t be silly”.’
    That’s exactly the expression I remember. 😉

  44. Thanks to Gaufrid for an excellent blog and to others who took the trouble to comment.

    ‘Soft’ was intended in the ‘malleable’ sense, as baerchen @35 suggested, but ‘silly’ seems to work just as well.

  45. Vlad at his very best, and not even at his fiendiest.
    We liked the puzzle very much but were reluctant to enter some unknown words in the SE.
    That said, we guessed MALAMUTE and HANUMAN (after which HASTIEST became our LOI).
    Both of them fairly clued.

    As to ‘soft’ as an anagram indicator, something in the back of my mind tells me that we had this issue before (I think, also in a Vlad puzzle).
    When I was young my parents used to call me (lovingly) Silly – they weren’t that good at English, in those days!
    At school and in my first few years as a student, many thought I was a ‘softie’ (think: relations).
    Full circle today!

    Many thanks Gaufrid.
    Quite unusual for you to have trouble to get going.

  46. My first time on this site and first time doing the Guardian online. My father’s struggles with Arucaria back in the 70’s (!) rather put me off the Guardian. But glad I’ve given it a go even if I found Vlad’s offering today had too much bite for me. Managed about half! I’m only commenting because I got A STUDY IN SCARLET from the (1,5,2,7) and couldn’t work out why. Reading the explanation above – fair but devilish – there’s a pleasing symmetry with my father’s favourite clue: “S.O.S? (13)” = naughtinesses.

  48. Thanks Vlad and Gaufrid.
    I’d never have parsed 8d in a million years. Needed parsing for 7d and 17d as well.
    So many great clues. Feel more confident of solving Vlad puzzles.

  50. Sil @45
    The ‘issue’ of anagram indicators came up with Vlad’s puzzle on 22 September. Both ‘fan’ and ‘easily’ were queried as anagrinds by myself and other solvers. The latter was an issue for me because it was in a clue that was key to both the theme and the puzzle. On that occasion there was a fairly long discussion to which Vlad contributed fully.
    I think it has to be each case on its merits. Today’s ‘soft’ has been explained satisfactorily (in my view), and confirmed by Vlad.

  51. Thanks Alan B, for making it clear.
    It was just ‘something lurking in the back on my mind’.
    But you’re right, that was it, now I remember.2

  52. I found this a very swift solve this morning (Saturday) – but so very enjoyable…. I too hesitated for a first foothold (not ’til the sixth clue read – ON THE MONEY – which was pretty obvious) which immediately led to another ‘easy’ one – STEP ON IT. Thereafter, they seemed to fly in (though the dog breed gave pause at the end – but the wordplay was tight enough to best my ignorance). I guess the fluency of ascent is defined by that first step! But what an enjoyable climb…..
    Vlad is one of those names (like Tramp, Screw, Philistine etc.) that I know will be fun….
    Can’t wait for his next one!
    Thanks to V and G

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