Guardian Prize 27,998 by Qaos

29 comments on “Guardian Prize 27,998 by Qaos”

1. Well! What to say? Was this really Guardian prize material? I’m not even sure it was Guardian material at all. I mean, 10,27,8, 22 or 25 just to name a few. Ok, Esurience was a new word to me but the anagram was obvious. The puzzle was tidy, the Agatha Christie theme amusing enough, for which thank you Qaos, but it was all over in 30 mins. I expect a Saturday puzzle to be a bit more challenging than this. The blog is very colourful, which is nice, and thanks for it PeeDee but …… Infinit? (7), really?

2. We did this yesterday evening, so still fresh in mind. Missed the theme completely, and ESURIANCE needed looking up, but otherwise a very pleasant and fairly clued puzzle. The PRUNING SHEARS anagram a particular fave.

   Many thanks to Qaos and PeeDee.

3. To Jaydee@1, we thought the clue for ENDLESS was excellent – as succinct as a clue could ever be, and obvious when the penny dropped. Irrespective of forms and conventions, if we can get it OK surely?

4. Thanks to Qaos and PeeDee. I had come across ESURIENCE before and for some reason took a while spotting DEATH,  but I was surprised how quickly I finished.

5. Thanks PeeDee. I see it Jaydee@1’s way. Completely missed the theme though.

6. Thanks Qaos and PeeDee.

   I do not think 22D can be left without quoting (the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations lists it as anonymous, Cornish):

   From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties
   And things that go bump in the night,
   Good Lord, deliver us!

7. Mrs ginf was the whodunnit and crime reader, shelves full of Christie, Sayer, Rendell, James et al. Read a few (liked Nine Tailors), but not really my thing. So, pottered through this glaringly obvious theme completely oblivious (even with murder, orient and express! d’oh). Hey ho. Agree a bit easy for a prize, with gimmes like express and radar, and regulars like the shaken speares, but I don’t mind; one can always tackle a Genius if bored. Thanks both.

8. Excellent puzzle. My favourites were DEATH, ASPERSE, DECIPHERED, WITNESS, RESITS, ENDLESS, ASSASSINS (loi).

   New word for me was ESURIENCE.

   Thank you Qaos and PeeDee.

   I totally missed seeing the theme!

9. Thanks Qaos and PeeDee

   A bit odd to have the Prize as the easiest one of the week – let’s hope today’s is a bit meatier. This was somewhat redeemed when the theme was pointed out to me – I hadn’t seen it myself, of course!

10. Also one who enjoyed without spotting the theme – my other half is a Christie completist and she didn’t notice either.

    Perhaps a bit on the easy side but enjoyable stuff. It’s all very well to talk about easiest puzzle of the week etc but I doubt I am the only one who only takes newspapers at the weekend and normally will only tackle the Saturday puzzles (here and FT)

11. The puzzle was so easy that I wonder how the Guardian dared to serve it up under the guise of a prize.

    It was not totally without credit.  I liked Doctor (Who) as an anagram indicator, bored doctor (to indicate insertion), expanding borders (for eg), the misleading 4 in 23ac which had nothing to do with 4dn.

    But there were far too many fairly obvious anagrams and generally simple clues.

    In Finnish, by the way, infinitives can and do take case and person endings.

    Thanks nonetheless to Qaos and to PeeDee.

12. Personally I thought it an excellent puzzle, I loved the concise clues, almost slight of hand, 22 down, how elegant.

    10 across, I read as simply the side of the word tyNE, felt like something Qaos would do!

13. Thanks both. I’m another who found it very quick, but enjoyable enough nonetheless. Of course I didn’t get the theme – I might have done had I looked for it. Anyone who didn’t know ESURIENCE (or at least its adjectival form) must be unfamiliar with the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch, though I’ve never seen or heard the word used anywhere else..

14. Enjoyed this one. I wondered whether pruning shears is also part of the theme – wasn’t Miss Marple frequently seen in her garden dead-heading roses? And the author in authorise seemed a hint too – but perhaps that’s pushing too far. Thanks to Qaos and PeeDee.

15. The strange thing about this puzzle is that Qaos tweeted about it, saying that as it was a prize puzzle, there was no ghost theme.

16. Bridgesong@15 – or perhaps a “no ghost” theme? Just lots of dead bodies.

17. Thank you Qaos for an intriguing puzzle and PeeDee for a helpful blog.

    bridgesong @15, perhaps the ASSASSINS’ AUTHOR IS DECIPHERED indicates there is no ghost theme?

18. Cookie: very good!  I also thought ASSASSINS linked to the theme.

19. I have all the Christie crime books, so discovered the theme early. Easy, yes, but enjoyable. Also FLORIN Court is the Art Deco place in London on which Whitehaven Mansions is based – Poirot’s residence. He is the investigator in 4 of the highlighted books.

20. I completed this but totally missed the theme. As an actor in summer rep., I had occasion to act in several AC plays and consequently hate the bloody woman.

21. I don’t see why it should be a rule that the prize is always tough otherwise how do you encourage newcomers to the pleasure of the pastime. It would be very demoralising if every prize crossword was a real head-scratcher and PeeDee has it about right to describe it as straightforward as it surely is to our bloggers and to seasoned solvers and you couldn’t say this was a write-in.

    For me it was good fun and well constructed as ever from Qaos. Thanks to you and to PeeDee.

22. I thought there were a lot of clues here which were badly written. Some had words in that did nothing cryptically but just helped the surface and some had dog-whistle indications.

    11a  Openings (definition) to (??) shorts held (fodder) apart (indicator, although partition is quite remote from rearrangement, isn’t it)

    12a  Woman rejects former partner’s wing (6)

    ‘rejects’ is a dog whistle. It alerts the experienced solver to the idea of a reversal which they then obediently apply to ‘former partner = EX’. But ‘rejects EX’ does not mean XE. ‘Rejected EX’ can, and works in the surface too, so why not use it? (‘Reject EX’, as an instruction to the solver also works cryptically, but not in the surface). If you tried to explain to a newbie why this leads to ANNEXE you would just have to say “‘if you see the word ‘reject’, however conjugated, look to reverse the order of something nearby”, which would just seem like an arbitrary rule. If ‘rejected’ was used, you could say “EX is another way of saying ‘former partner’, and ‘reject’ can mean ‘throw back’, so you’ve got ‘thrown back EX’, or XE”.

    19a Poor (anag indicator) niece sure (anag fodder) has (in what sense? ‘leads to’, ‘gives’, maybe but the anagram doesn’t “have” anything, does it?) hunger (definition)

    2d Determines the position of (definition) in-store (fodder) clobber (dog-whistle).

    I can accept that if you clobber a bunch of letters (i,n,s,t,o,r and e in this case) they might get shaken up into a different order, but this clue neither instructs me to clobber the fodder, nor describes the fodder as (to be) clobbered. Again there was a perfectly easy way to write this properly: ‘Determines the position of clobber in store’.

    6d Struggle raising temperature (RESIST, raising the T to a higher position in the word) on (??) subsequent attempts (definition)

    9d Tool (definition) ensuring sharp (anagram fodder) designs (dog-whistle)

    ‘[fodder] designs’ doesn’t mean ‘design this fodder’ or ‘this fodder needs to be designed’, even accepting that to ‘design’ a bunch of letters is to rearrange them (redesign would be better, obviously)

    21d Sailor can jail band over onset of war

    It’s obvious there’s something wrong with this one from the parsing given (“can jails …”, not ‘can jail …’ as in the clue). Qaos wants to say that the word ‘can’ ‘jails’ the band REM (itself ‘over’ W), but he says it in pidgin.

    22d  When things go bump?

    In the surface, ‘things’ is plural and ‘go’ agrees, but cryptically, the word ‘things’ goes bump (gets anagrammed).

    Btw, Peedee, in 3d, ‘about’ is a containment indicator, not a reversal indicator

23. Thanks for spotting that Tony, fixed now.

24. Very late to comment as my weekend was very busy, but I hope that Qaos and PeeDee do get to read this. I trust Qaos wasn’t disheartened by some of the comments above which I thought were quite unfair. I liked finding all the Agatha Christie references. I read her avidly in my teens and twenties. I originally thought the theme was just to do with death but then saw the novel titles all coming together as I got closer to the end. I do think it odd that some posters who didn’t see the theme had a whinge about the puzzle being too easy! It was a neat theme IMHO.
    I relished a couple of the clues like 14a ASSASSINS and 28a ASPERSE – “Shake(-)speare’s”  was such a clever way to clue an anagram! I also enjoyed quirky clues like Infinit? for 8d ENDLESS (even if others didn’t) and wrote on the grid against 19a ESURIENCE, “Lovely word!”.

    I wish now that I was not so late to go on the forum as I would have liked some more balance in the blog. Sometimes I think the keyboard anonymity of this site invites negative comments that would not be said in a face to face conversation, which distresses me. Qaos remains one of my favourite setters and has given me lots of fun and challenge over the last couple of years – and on this occasion, I found this puzzle right up my alley.

25. Hi Julie, I always get to read the comments however late they are and I am always glad that people take the time to comment!

    I know just how you feel about some of the negative comments seeming disrespectful.  From writing hundreds of blogs and annotating tens of thousands of clues I have learned that there are many ways to enjoy a crossword, and what one person enjoys another person considers unpalatable.  I try and see the more animated comments as someone’s heartfelt responses to something they think is very important to them (even if it doesn’t seem important to the setter).

    In this case I think there are people for whom the rules of “cryptic grammar” are a core tenet of the way they think of a puzzle, and Qaos doesn’t have a very slavish approach to these rules.  I’m fine with this, the rules seem fairly arbitrary to me, but there are those for whom the rules are not arbitrary and believe a setter can’t just write whatever they think works for them.

    I try to think of the views as complementary rather than contradictory.  Just because I like something (or not) isn’t any reason for someone else to like it.  I find this approach makes the process of going through all the comments more palatable.  Glad you enjoyed the puzzle and I hope that you will keep coming back!

26. Thank you, PeeDee, for your very balanced perspective regarding complimentariness (if I can take the liberty of inventing a new word). We all have our points of view, and different perspectives on each day’s puzzles are very refreshing and helpful. I can be very logical in some ways but am often more of a “big picture” solver and not always analytical and precise in my approach, which must annoy some of our contributors. But I always try to appreciate the people behind our puzzles and the forum. I do understand that many solvers are more inclined than me simply to “cut to the chase” and dissect/critique the puzzle itself. That’s fine, and many critical comments are, in the spirit of the blog, well argued. I just felt that this was one of those blogs that was out of balance and unfair so wanted to make a positive contribution. Hope I don’t sound too much like a Pollyanna.

27. [I think “complementariness” was the new word I was trying to invent!]

28. I like that.  Complimentariness conveys a double meaning of “difference” and also “politeness and respect”.

29. Julie, I think it was unnecessary for you to invent “complimentariness”, since ‘complementarity’ (“a concept, first adopted in microphysics, which accepts the existence of superficially inconsistent views of an object or phenomenon”, Chambers) already exists. Is that what you meant?

    FWIW, I liked “Shakespeare’s slander”, too (even though a Ximenean would probably reject it) and I probably would not have objected to the lovely “When things go bump?”, if I hadn’t started to inspect the puzzle with a fine-tooth comb. I don’t want clues that blindly “follow rules” but I do want them to say what they mean (Afrit’s Injunction) not just lazily chuck in a dog-whistle ‘indicator’ to trigger a learned response.

    In short, I am still not agree that puzzle is can fail in say exactly its mean with expressiveness it is appropriate to. Get me?

Comments are closed.