i Cryptic Crossword 3517 Serpent
May 17, 2022
Difficulty rating (out of five): 🌟🌟🌟🌟
A quick blog today, sorry, as I have to travel this morning for work. Our Tuesday theme? It’s the… Well, look in the top and bottom rows. I imagine most solvers will have twigged as various items appeared in the grid, and it certainly helped with what was a fairly tricky solve. Enjoyable as always, though, from Serpent.
COD? I’ll go with 6d – “Discovering strange shiny objects on stars? (8)”.
All the answers and parsing of the clues can be found in Fifteensquared’s blog from April 2018:
https://www.fifteensquared.net/2018/04/24/independent-9837-serpent/
Borodin
batarde
Saboteur
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
willow1235
idothei 
Delightful!
The grid fill inspired and the clues top notch. How does he do it?
Always cheering to see Serpent’s name, and he never disappoints. Just the two *s, but a great deal to enjoy and admire.
Good to get a genuine indisputable homophone for a change.
I had to “cheat” to find pseudobulb, which I’ve never heard of..
CoD a close-run thing between 8 and 24.
Is there another setter who consistently maintains such a brilliant standard?
Agreed with the above. Serpent offers consistently corruscating crosswords which display creativity and great surface readings. Always a joy.
I needed to check PSEUDOBULB, but did so for my own edification, not because I was in any doubt. PDM moment for SEPTIMAL took a while, but was worth the wait. I didn’t know the variant of “suttee”. Thought it ought to be “suti” but decided to trust the wordplay and check SATI on the Internet.
BLUE was really good.
I too had to look up pseudobulb. Couldn’t parse deity at the end. Otherwise fine & fun though 🙂
The theme made it much easier. I thought 4 stars overstated it. If I had written 9 across I would have put excavating.
Sure, that could work for a modern day Pompeii, but I think the intention was to take us to Pompeii at the time of the eruption, when some people (though obviously not all) had been evacuated and the thick dust was swirling.
Yes.. reasonable.
I really enjoyed this – it was definitely a ‘roll your sleeves up’ solve.
Not more than two or three stars for me, helped by the obvious theme and nina. A great puzzle nevertheless. I did have to look up PSEUDOBULB, having completely forgotten it (and the rest of the puzzle) since 2018.