3 hours ago
10
It’s April, so it’s time to continue our tracking of the ebb and flow of April foolery in crossword puzzles. In brief, the good times continue.
I haven’t yet found any cryptics of the rule-bending variety, but, avoiding spoilers, would like to recommend the Financial Times puzzle by the setter known locally as Harpo, navigating to Independent 12,318 by the solver known locally as Enigmatist and our own Paul here at the Guardian.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the New York Times occasionally breaks an amusing quotation over longer entries, clued “Quip, part 1” and so on, the solver using crossing letters to piece together the witticism. It appeared that Wednesday’s was one of those, except that adding together the entries did not create anything especially quotable …
QUICK START
YOUNG AT HEART
SECOND LINE
PAY UP FRONT
… so it takes a moment to see how these give a QUIP in a way that we see more often on this side of the water.
Here’s the solution for Turnstone’s crafty Genius, which asked the solver to move letters between across and down clues, generating the message:
SUM TO FINAL
The sum of the numbers for each of these paired clues is also the final clue number and our theme, THIRTY-ONE, hinted at by unclued entries GALLIUM, NETHERLANDS and HOGMANAY. As May rolls in, it’s time for another Genius: it’s from KGB and you probably won’t polish it off on the bus to work.
In our cluing conference, many thanks for your clues for GREENE. I was immediately drawn to Le74’s “He wrote the beginning of the end of the genre novel”, but I can’t currently see how it works. When Greene is the author Graham, there are happily many titles which suggest wordplay, such as The Heart of the Matter, referenced in Wellywearer2’s “Author of tt”.
That clue would have taken the audacity award were it not for an announcement by Rakali:
Blend cryptic wordplay with Japanese verse to form a delectable haiklu (patent pending)
he made The Third Man
once oddly go missing with
endless avarice
(6)
The runners-up are Mr_Rob_T’s clever “Wilder perhaps carrying on becoming author” and Newlaplandes’s nostalgic “Teenagers perhaps sat around with this Blue Peter presenter”; the winner is the evocative “Lime, perhaps, Vienna’s third man who told tales”.
Kludos to Fozza9. Please leave entries for GREENE below, along with any favourite clues or puzzles you have spotted.
