AZED CROSSWORD 1342

ALIENS / RAPINE

1.  J. R. Tozer: Spoiling drap, in Edinburgh house a piece of ice put in glass reveals Sassenachs to Scots? (hidden; a + i in lens; house vb).

2.  C. R. Gumbrell: Deals in uncommonly striking Dutch transfers taking Gunners to peak? (anag. less D; RA pine; peak²; ref. Arsenal stars Bergkamp and Overmars).

3.  A. J. Dorn: Pitch, laid in a very short time, exposes foreigners to blame in England’s opening game (lie (= slope) in a ns (= nanosecond); rap in E; ref. abortive first test in WI).

VHC

M. Barley: See vintage transport take a long while tackling slope close to Brighton – any here’ll have travelled far (r a pine; lie n in as).

E. A. Beaulah: An isle is shaken: Kiwis among others the victims when Napier’s devastated (anag.; anag.; ref. NZ North Island earthquake of 1931).

E. J. Burge: Barbarians playing in Sale nip ear in scrum, taking possession unlawfully (anag.; anag.).

B. Burton: Plundering runs, a power batting side with ultimate in technique explosively nails English outsiders (r a P in (noun) e; anag. + E).

D. J. Dare-Plumpton: Saline malfunctioning transfers right terrible pain ending in massive seizure (anag.; r + anag. + e).

N. C. Dexter: Sack a Pres. discounting hint of scandal in devious answer containing untruth for outsiders? (anag. less s; lie in ans.).

Dr I. S. Fletcher: Maybe such as greener work entails removing bit of trash by filling refuse sack (anag., less t; greener = newly-arrived immigrant; in in rape⁴).

G. I. L. Grafton: Outsiders from all imaginable nations are illicitly grabbing one’s card number, extracting loot (outside letters & lit.; PIN in anag.).

Mrs E. Greenaway: Diamond perhaps in Kimberley country turned up, foreigners plunder rand before long (Neil in SA (all rev.); R a (= ante) pine; ref. singer).

R. R. Greenfield: Imported plants, hybrid lines, a species of brassica hiding in sacking (anag.; in in rape).

R. Hesketh: In a balmy spell an isle’s old peregrines are trained outside to hold fast prey (anag.; pin in anag.).

T. M. Hoggart: Foreigners land right in the middle of Anglo-Saxon kingdom of old (Edmund’s) to seize power and plunder (lien in AS; P in raine).

D. F. Manley: Plundering soldiers coming with wooden whopper, number packed in as outsiders (RA pine; lie n in as; ref. Trojan Horse).

Dr E. J. Miller: Those not included in sale fiddles do in a rep appropriating loot! (anag.; anag.).

T. J. Moorey: Devastating pitch cracks are distressing Jamaicans? Answer as before, lay new square (pin in anag.; a lie n s).

C. J. Morse: Take a long spoiling lie in on ancient Sabbath – that’s for otherworldly types (r a pine; lie in an³ + S).

R. J. Palmer: Nip ear in scrum? That’s violation Barbarians are right to suppress finally (anag.; a lien s).

D. R. Robinson: Lean is recollected making strangers empathise during encounter initially getting carried away (anag.; rap in e; ref. film ‘Brief Encounter’ dir. by David L.).

A. J. Wardrop: Refuse embraces by marauding strangers when protecting right over property (in in rape⁴; lien in as).

HC

D. Appleton, D. Ashcroft, Mrs F. A. Blanchard, G. C. Brown, Dr J. Burscough, D. A. Campbell, C. A. Clarke, E. Cross, R. Dean, P. S. Elliott, A. G. Fleming, H. Freeman, G. Johnstone, F. P. N. Lake, C. J. Lowe, R. K. Lumsdon, Ms R. MacGillivray, P. W. Marlow, C. G. Millin, P. W. Nash, F. R. Palmer, G. Perry, D. Price Jones, J. Saynor, W. Scott, P. L. Stone, C. W. Thomas, Mrs J. E. Townsend, L. Ward, A. West, R. J. Whale, I. J. Wilcock, Ms S. Wise, Dr E. Young.
 

Comments
292 entries, few mistakes - mostly BANIAN for BANYAN, and the competitor who submitted a completed diagram with DTHEREHEREAN at I Across! Several of you rightly queried my defining a carp as a marine creature in the clue to SCARF. This was pure inadvertence. I’m no angler but I do know that a carp is a freshwater fish, In a desperate attempt at self-justification I found that the big Webster’s includes a secondary definition of carp which reads ‘any of several somewhat carplike fishes that do not belong to the family Cyprinidae (as the carpsucker and the European sea bream)’. This just about lets me off the hook (sorry!), but it was still careless of me, and I apologize. Mr Tozer (to whom congratulations) kindly remarked that my slip ‘served more to amuse than to confuse’.
 
The grid contained an exceptional number of 6-letter words (22 of them). Was this a record, I was asked? I really couldn’t say, but I have to confess, somewhat shamefacedly, that in a lazy moment and because I was pressed for time I ‘lifted’ the pattern from an old Ximenes puzzle which was reprinted in the 1972 Penguin collection of X puzzles (dedicated, I see, to DWT, NJ, CAB, HHLD, CJM, AR, and old Uncle RP and all’). It has to be said that the ‘Right & Left’ format in its original form does restrict the number of acceptable grid patterns quite severely, so I’m not too contrite about this. Why ‘Right & Left’ and not ‘Left & Right’? Ask me another. It was Xirnenes’s title and I’ve stuck to it.
 
Apart from one regular who complained that the competition was too easy and a bore to solve, most of you seem to have relished the double-clue format for a change, and found that the clue words offered a wide range of possible approaches. Most competitors had clearly tried to disguise the break between the two parts to their clue, which to me is the essence of this type of ‘special’. Doing this and arriving at a form of wording for the whole clue which makes reasonable sense should be the ultimate goal. Grammatically sound nonsense is less impressive, to say the least.
 
A miscellany of minor points: (a) I cannot accept ‘saline solution’ (quite common among clues submitted) as indicating an anagram of SALINE. and have said repeatedly that such a device (using a noun as if it were an adjective) is unacceptable to me. I doubt whether its perpetrators would accept ‘difficult solution’ as a fair indication of an anagram of DIFFICULT. (b) Would I accept ‘brief encounter’ for ‘e’? No, since it’s not a standard abbreviation. (c) ‘N Armstrong’ to indicate NEIL A in an otherwise promising clue was, I thought, asking too much of the solver. (d) What do I think of the not uncommon instruction to solvers of specialist crosswords that ‘punctuation may be misleading’? I disapprove of it strongly, and regard it as a lazy cop-out. English punctuation has a function, and if it is used in a clue I don’t see how that function can be ignored just because it suits the crossword setter. (e) Tony Beaulah has sent me further details about the Dictionary of Eponyms mentioned in last month’s slip. It is an American book and can be obtained through Bibliophile Books.