In the sample clues below, the links take you to explainers from our beginners series. The setter’s name often links to an interview with him or her, in case you feel like getting to know these people better.
The news in clues
Happy New Year and please do share any links to any puzzles from the festive period that you’ve appreciated; my solving was a little curtailed by Covid and I missed some of my usual treats.
We did have, though, at least two look-back-at-2023 puzzles – each offering some grins, and not all of the grins rictus ones.
In the Financial Times, Buccaneer (known locally as Picaroon) gives us an image of one kind of scandal …
26d Day on drug for peer accused of misdeeds (4)
[ wordplay: abbrev. for a day of the week + slang for a kind of drug ]
[ MON + E ]
[ definition: peer accused of misdeeds ]
… en route to Michelle MONE. And in the Times, Micawber allows us to look forward as well as back with this clue …
1a Notice Selby upset – these votes can be significant (2-9)
[ wordplay: anagram of (‘upset’) NOTICESELBY ]
[ definition: these votes can be significant ]
… for BY-ELECTIONS. Both puzzles also referenced the current last Beatles single, a mark of its meaning something, though I’m not certain what.
Keeping house
Solvers here will have noticed a previously familiar nom de guerre: Yank. Under his other name, Fred Piscop, he is not at all unfamiliar across the Atlantic: he is crossword royalty who also constructed something called Track Maintenance for the puzzle-heavy festive edition of the New Yorker, which I heartily recommend.
Piscop’s puzzle was first fed into the Guardian’s in-tray some time ago: does his appearance mean that there will be a bewildering array of brand-new setters as we begin 2024? It does not. The stable will evolve – as it always has – but for the foreseeable future, the watchword is continuity. When submissions are welcome, as they say, there will be an immediate and unmistakeable announcement.
And a question. The task that has dropped to the bottom of the to-do list is updating the annotated solutions for prize puzzles. Since there are weeks when a puzzle has more clues than its annotated solution does readers, I wonder whether any of you are devoted to the feature and why.
Latter patter
Paul appears to be talking about undergarments, but it’s really all a bunch …
20d Bloomers dropped, pulled up to cover bare bum (6)
[ wordplay: synonym for ‘dropped’, reversed (‘pulled up’), containing (‘to cover’) BUM without first & last letters (‘bare’) ]
[ backwards SPILT containing U ]
[ definition: flowers ]
… of TULIPS. The tulip ultimately gets its name from the turban – and that headgear is somewhere in the name of (and sometimes stands in as the name of) the subject of our next challenge. It’s a foodstuff many Guardian readers now associate with critic Stuart Heritage …
… reader, how would you clue BUNDT CAKE?
Cluing competition
Many thanks for your clues for JACK, a word versatile enough to keep us going through the cold nights. The runners-up are GappyTooth’s misdirecting “Salt found in bowls” and Phitonelly’s elegant “Kennedy’s approval from Berlin or from Cork?”; the winner is the counterintuitive “What comes after ten? Nothing”.
Kludos to EleanorofAquitaine; please leave entries for the current competition – and especially non-print finds and picks that I may have missed from the broadsheet cryptics – in the comments.
Clue from elsewhere of the fortnight
We return to topicality, at least on the surface, in this Telegraph clue …
29a 45 minutes, perhaps, then popular papers upset Harry?
[ wordplay: three-quarters of the word HOUR (‘45 minutes’) + synonyms for ‘popular’ and ‘papers’ reversed (‘upset’) ]
[ HOU + reversed IN & ID ]
[ definition: Harry? (as an example) ]
… for HOUDINI. Onwards!
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop
