Guardian 25,945 / Araucaria (12/5/13)

22 comments on “Guardian 25,945 / Araucaria (12/5/13)”

1. Many thanks Gaufrid for riding to the rescue and Araucaria for another wonderful puzzle.

   My entry into the theme was 7d where MAURICE CHEVALIER came to mind although I wasn’t aware of TRACY the writer with that name.

   Then 8d MANSFIELD suggested Jayne – who else?

   Delightfully misleading!

2. Thanks Gaufrid. I don’t know anything abour Jewish law but the anagrind in 9 was plain enough and Google informed me that NASHIM is the third order of the Mishnah (sic), containing the laws related to women and family life. This left me high and dry with 6 and 8 and doubting 11 until Katherine asserted herself. I enjoyed it.

3. Very enjoyable but what an intriguing mix of writers. Thanks to Araucaria for the entertainment and extra thanks to Gaufrid for stepping into the breach with the explanations.

4. Good Saturday puzzle that I found tricky, especially as I didn’t know some of the writers.

   Thanks Gaufrid for stepping in. I didn’t correctly parse STEINBECK, thinking the ‘neck’ was as in ‘neck of the woods,’ so I was not entirely confident with the answer. Then, I got LAMPEDUSA and thought the theme must be islands! 🙁

   I share your reservations about EBB. The only other way I could parse it is if the first definition is ‘go down’ and the second ‘out’ as one (‘s’) with fleet. That seems very convoluted with one just referring to a single letter. Doubt whether that really holds water. 😉

5. Thanks to Gaufrid for the blog.
   Normally I wait for Saturday morning to look at the blog for the previous Saturday’s puzzle but this time I tried looking just after midnight – nothing there. I tried again soon after 0730 – still nothing so I put a post on the Site Feedback. Gaufrid was already aware and has now stepped in for the official blogger. Many thanks to Gaufrid.

   In the past I have seen people complaining about the grid and today I can really agree! What we had here was four thematic blocks linked in the least possible way.

   My entry was 6d then Maurice Chevalier then the others in the NE corner.
   Then I managed the NW corner followed by SW.

   For a long time my SE corner was totally blank but I finally cracked it.

   Once I had cracked the theme I thought to see which of these authors were present on my bookshelves. I have six of them so I had some help for half of the theme people.

6. Thanks for the blog. I really enjoyed wrestling with this – some of the authors were a bit outside my comfort zone but there was no need for google (with such a broad theme I’m not sure it would have been much help) and cracking the theme was very satisfying (Du Maurier was my way in). I also get pleasure from setters’ feats of construction like this, although some people seem to find them annoying.

   Re 21a I’d go for “perverse” rather than “faulty”, although clues can certainly be both… I think A’s pretending to interpret “Ebbs” in “Ebbsfleet” like a stage direction or similar, where “stares dumbfounded” “leaves” or similar means “[the speaker/aforementioned character] stares/leaves etc.” Hence “Ebbs” would mean “[someone or something] ebbs”, so to do “as” one such would be to “ebb”. The question mark would seem to concede that this is pretty weird. I think Gaufrid’s CD interpretation – the fleet goes up and down with the tide – is certainly valid too so the clue could be seen as a partial &lit. But at the time I think I actually parsed it as a (rather good) CD and didn’t think of Ebbsfleet.

7. We think Araucaria has been quite cunning here – has anyone noticed that the across authors are male and the down authors are female? (we think Pratchett is Ann Pratchett rather than Terry).

8. I had parsed 21ac as Ebbsfleet -> Ebb’s fleet, so one with Fleet is Ebb.

   Seemed OK to me…

9. I finished the NE corner of this puzzle first, and when I suspected that the answer to 27a was HAWTHORNE the penny finally dropped regarding the theme of this puzzle. From then on, it was like doing four separate puzzles, with the SW being the last corner that I tackled, and the one that I found most difficult, probably because for quite a while I thought the answer to 30a was ‘Guinea’.

   I liked 6d, 3d, 1a and 16d (last in).

   I couldn’t parse 21a.

   Thanks for the blog, Gaufrid.

10. @Wukka-
    Yes, that makes a lot more sense!

11. I had never heard of Ebbsfleet but once Google confirmed it existed I parsed 21a as Wukka28 did.

    Thanks Gaufrid for stepping in. The grid and the theme made this a bit of a slog for me.

12. snagglepuss@7: I had not noticed. I was just so glad to have found 12 novelists that fitted the clues that I looked no further.
    I am sure you are right about A being a bit clever here since I do not believe this m/f division could have happened by accident.

13. Hi Snagglepus @7 & chas @12

    Unfortunately Ann Patchett doesn’t have an ‘r’ in her surname so it has to be Terry (as per the annotated solution).

14. Hi Gaufrid @13

    Oops! So near and yet so far…. That will teach us to make assumptions. Ah well – we enjoyed it anyway, even though we’d talked ourselves into looking for female down clues (which worked – more or less).

15. Thanks for stepping in Gaufrid. My way in was DU MAURIER. When I got HIGHSMITH and MANSFIELD soon after, I wondered whether all the authors would be female…but that would really be a stretch! BLACKMORE was unfamiliar, but not his book ‘Lorna Doone’, which I read years and years ago.

    Really enjoyable puzzle from Araucaria.

16. Thanks, Gaufrid, for stepping in.

    I share all the reservations about EBB.

    I parsed 8dn as MALE LINE = man’s field [Chambers: ‘line – sphere of interest’ [= field] and the country park as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park – so a different Jane for me, Bryan @1 [but then you would naturally think of the one with a ‘Y’! 😉

17. This season Ebbsfleet Utd finished next to bottom of the Blue Square Bet Premier League and were relegated, thus going down and out. Irrelevant but interesting.

18. As the scheduled blogger, can I add my heartfelt thanks to Gaufrid for stepping into the breach with no notice at all. I only realised this morning that it was my turn, but I’m away from home and had no Internet access for most of the day. And I can’t improve on Gaufrid’s comments.

19. Quite an enjoyable crossword. The big A was a little too Libertarian, (bordering on dodgy), in a couple of places but all gettable.

    I’d never heard of Carson MCCULERS or indeed “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”! However the wordplay made it clear enough once you believed a name could start MCC!

    I don’t understand these recent complaints about the grids. Surely a grid is a grid! Some help more than others with crossed squares. As long as we have some crossing it’s still a “crossword”!

    Enjoyable while it lasted but again too easy for a Prize in my opinion!

    Thanks to Araucaria and Gaufrid.

20. CGK @ 17.

    I think your comment is far from irrelevant. Although it hadn’t occurred to me while solving, it now appears to be the missing link that makes sense of the clue.

21. Thanks Araucaria and Gaufrid

    Another good challenge from A and as per usual he was able to deliver 4-5 new authors that I previously didn’t know. My first theme answer was PASTERNAK and did have to grind most of the others out – finally finishing with PRATCHETT as last in.

    Had no idea with EBBsfleet and had used the unconvincing parsing of Gaufrid as my justification – having seen CGK@17’s observation – it makes for a cracking clue. How does A get himself across all of this knowledge ?

22. This is what a Saturday puzzle should be like. OK, not perfect? Who cares, it was a fantastic challenge to use all research possibilities to break it open.

    Hard but not impossible.

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