As is often the case in Genius puzzles, the special instructions were a little mysterious at first:
“Seven solutions are of a kind and lack further definition. They must be suitably transformed before being entered in the grid.” Still, only seven funnies to worry about, and it was obvious from the letter counts, which “indicate the solutions, pre-transformation” rather than the length of the grid entries, where they were, though it was a bit confusing that two clues – 4a and 3d – didn’t indicate that they were two-part answers (still not corrected on the Guardian site, I see).
Anyway, I worked my way with varying success through the normal clues, and eventually realised that 4,29 had to be WONDER WOMAN, from which it was a short leap to see that the special entries were all superheroes, the pre-transformation answers being their alter egos or secret identities. A few of these were familiar to me from reading the comics in my youth, but I had to look up STEVE ROGERS and TONY STARK.
The final step was to change the “unique letter [that] appears once in the thematic solutions before transformation and once in the non-thematic solutions”. This turned out to be the letter V, which occurs once in the normal answers in VERB (9a) and once in the secret identities in STEVE ROGERS. Changing VERB to HERB reveals [The Incredible] HULK in the first column.
Thanks to Tramp for (yet another) enjoyable and challenging puzzle.
In the notes below I’ve shown the answers to the special clues normally, with the grid entries after them in brackets, and the definition (where there is one) is underlined.
| Across | ||
| 1. Copper joining risqué office of clergyman (6) | ||
| CURACY | CU + RACY | |
| 4,24. Two once in a marriage of three – pervert and nice pair? (5,6) | ||
| DIANA PRINCE (WONDER WOMAN) | Reference to the statement by Diana, Princess of Wales in her interview with Martin Bashir that “there were three of us in that marriage”, one of the three being Camilla Parker-Bowles, and the other two DIANA and the PRINCE; there’s also an anagram of AND NICE PAIR | |
| 9. Short note backing part of speech (4) | ||
| VERB (HERB) | BREV[e] reversed. It’s a nice oddity of the history of musical notation that the breve, which, as its name indicates, started off as a denoting short note, is now the longest in normal use (and pretty rare itself – the semibreve being the longest note seen in most music). | |
| 10. A liberal covering international danger (5) | ||
| PERIL | I in PER (a, as in 10p per/a pound) + L | |
| 11. Issue number shortly (3) | ||
| SON | SON[g] | |
| 12. Muse‘s film shot from unfamiliar tours (6) | ||
| URANIA | UNFAMILIAR* less FILM. Urania is the Muse of astronomy | |
| 13. How former chancellor’s name might be announced formally with leader of Tories? (5,4) | ||
| CLARK KENT (SUPERMAN) | The former Chancellor of the Exchquer might be announced (homophonically) as “Clarke, Ken” (Kenneth, surely, for full formality?), plus T for Tories | |
| 14. Perhaps St James’s people left dealing with doctors nursing individual (9) | ||
| LONDONERS | L ( ON (dealing with) + ONE in DRS | |
| 16. Dovetailing “Ricky Gervais”, ultimately with “live Extras” (4) | ||
| BYES | [rick]Y [gervai]S entwined with the letters of BE (live), giving extras in cricket; and of course “Extras” was a TV series written by Gervais | |
| 17. “… frozen” – Chancellor of the Exchequer in papers (4) | ||
| ICED | CE in ID | |
| 18. Safe one pulling up (5,6) | ||
| PETER PARKER (SPIDERMAN) | PETER (a safe) + PARKER (one pulling up in a car) | |
| 22. Carp about hospital – primarily lunches revolve around boiled cabbage (8) | ||
| KOHLRABI | H + L[unches] R[evolve] A[round] b[oiled] in KOI | |
| 23. One captured during battle with the German dust (6) | ||
| POWDER | POW (prisoner of war) + DER (German “the”) | |
| 25. Curiosity is there? Losing a title (3) | ||
| MRS | MARS (where the Curiosity rover is) less A | |
| 26. Cars go astray, reversing on motorway (5) | ||
| MINIS | M1 + SIN< | |
| 27. Disable artificial intelligence in time for millennium bug? (4) | ||
| MAIM | AI in MM (i.e. the year 2000, when the Millennium bug was due to strike) | |
| 28. Proceeding gingerly from No Smoking having dismissed McDonalds fine (6) | ||
| NOSING | NO SMOKING less M OK | |
| 29. Part of Australian game – Qantas permit BA’s three terminals to go to New Zealand/Australia (6) | ||
| STANZA | Last letters of qantaS permiT bA + NZA. Chambers doesn’t have it, but I found Collins Dictionary online gives the definition “(US & Australian) a half or a quarter in a football match”. | |
| Down | ||
| 1. Revolutionary drama on satellite for so long (7) | ||
| CHEERIO | CHE (Guevara) + ER (TV drama) + IO (a satellite of Jupiter) | |
| 2. Beginnings to inventor’s creative knowledge – bag finally removed inside vacuum cleaner (4,7) | ||
| DICK GRAYSON (ROBIN) | ICK + GRA[b] in DYSON | |
| 3,20. Alter egos: revert second (5,6) | ||
| STEVE ROGERS (CAPTAIN AMERICA) | (EGOS REVERT S)* | |
| 5. Extra large one with power, wearing big bloomers (6) | ||
| OXLIPS | XL + I + P in OS | |
| 6. Killer Queen following remix of final parts to Somebody to Love or Fat Bottomed Girls (9) | ||
| DESTROYER | Last letters of somebodY tO lovE oR faT bottomeD girlS + ER, and cleverly including the names of three songs by Queen | |
| 7. Republican with sign of boredom turning up in American strips (7) | ||
| RUNWAYS | R in reverse of YAWN in US | |
| 8. Inspector rips off notes with bad handwriting? (13) | ||
| PRESCRIPTIONS | (INSPECTOR RIPS)* with reference to doctors’ famously bad handwriting. These days prescriptions usually come in printed form | |
| 15. Rewriting studies to accommodate two learners – they might struggle over honours (9) | ||
| DUELLISTS | LL in STUDIES* – duels were fought over “matters of honour” | |
| 17. US theatre awards on Jack Black’s finale (4,5) | ||
| TONY STARK (IRON MAN) | TONYS + TAR + [blac]K | |
| 19. Initial payment is turning up in store (7) | ||
| DEPOSIT | IS< in DEPOT | |
| 21. Be without former police in Belfast, with Irish singer upset (5,5) | ||
| BRUCE WAYNE (BATMAN) | RUC in BE W[ith] ENYA< | |
Thanks, Andrew & Tramp. I actually found this to be one of the easier Genius puzzles of late. I started by tackling the clues whose letter counts didn’t match the grid. Once I got TONY STARK, I wrote down as many alter egos (nice touch, Tramp, working that into 3/20) I could think of — came up with all the ones used in this puzzle except DIANA PRINCE. (I also wrote down DAVID BANNER, who appears implicitly in the final transformation.) An enjoyable puzzle, but the fun was over too quickly. I particularly liked 6d – surely this is the first time a setter has worked 3 Queen songs into a single clue!
Interesting that Collins lists STANZA as a term in US and Aussie football. Can’t say I’ve ever heard a half or quarter of American football referred to as a stanza.
Finally, I think you meant “Clarke, Ken” in your explanation of 13.
Many thanks Andrew for the excellent blog and for your kind words.
I wrote this puzzle way back in March 2011 and I think it was the fourth crossword I drafted for consideration as a future Guardian puzzle. I was (even more) naïve back then and figured it could be a possible Prize puzzle. Originally, HULK was a Nina down the left-hand side and the preamble just said something like “seven solutions are of a kind, lack definition and need to be suitably transformed before entry into the grid”. In fact, the left-hand side read HULKA, I think. When Hugh got round to considering this puzzle he told me it would have to be a Genius; I agreed but figured it was too easy. Some time last year, I redesigned the grid a little so that the left-hand side read HULK, changed HERB to VERB and came up with the idea of bringing HULK into the final step. I needed a way to try to make solvers work out the pre-transformed solutions or else I figured it would be way too easy. I wanted to uniquely identify the ‘V’ by using just the “real names” but there was no obvious way of doing this. In the end, to identify the ‘V’, I had to use the list of real names and the other entries in the grid — this ended up being a really complicated instruction to just change one character and, on reflection, I could have written it a bit neater: it would have read a bit better if I were allowed to use italics in the preamble. As it turned out, I think many solvers will have spotted the superheroes’ idea, spotted VULK in the completed grid and therefore not needed to solve the clues for the “real names”; I know this is what my brother did!
I think it’s a decent puzzle and I quite like some of the clues, especially the DIANA PRINCE one.
Tramp
Thanks Andrew and Tramp. Enjoyable stuff even though I knew few of the real names. Funnily enough it was Diana Prince that I found hardest to parse.
Lovely puzzle; thank you Tramp. I would have been able to solve it in a couple of hours, if it weren’t for the fact that one of the first entries I spotted was “…./Stark”: this provided an interesting diversion while I tried to parse the clues into characters from Game of Thrones …
Has anyone managed to access this month’s Genius yet? When I try on Firefox I am taken to a page that uselessly says “You are already signed in” and from which I can only navigate to the Guardian main news page. Internet Explorer takes me to what looks like the normal Genius page but with the puzzle space blank.
Another Graudiad cock-up, or is all this part of the solving challenge?
Ian – I was having similar trouble with it earlier, but I can see it now (with IE, Firefox and Chrome). I seem to remember there were similar delays last month.
A fun time was had solving this, thanks Tramp (and Andrew). As has been said, one of the easier Genius’s but a good challenge.
6D was brilliant.
I saw the Hulk reference but forgot to change the V to H in my submission – no prize for me yet again !
Thank you Andrew and (Super) Tramp. O.K., it was a bit easy but it was great fun.
I’ve been away, so I’m late to providing some comment. I too liked this puzzle a lot, but as Tramp suggested I found the changing of the letter instructions ludicrously convoluted, and fairly misleading. The use of the word ‘appropriately’ led me to look for some connection between changing the ‘H’ for a ‘V’. I probably spent more time looking for this than actually doing the crossword; which I agree with paul8hours was not too difficult at all, and less so than many regular daily crosswords. As I have said before though, it depends on whether you are on the setter’s wavelength, and on this occasion I tuned in very nicely. Had a great time with it.