i Cryptic Crossword 3547 Punk
June 21, 2022
Difficulty rating (out of five): 🌟🌟🌟
Some days you can’t spot the theme in a puzzle for looking, others, well, they’re signposted as clearly as they come. How well you got on with today’s offering will depend a lot on how well you know the works of the children’s author referenced in the middle of the grid. Everybody must know the title at the very bottom, surely, but I’m guessing I won’t have been alone in checking others on Google.
This was a little tricky in places – the wordplay for 10ac and 12ac were both quite fiendish, the former requiring a leap of faith to a fairly well known song, the latter a little French. I will freely admit to lobbing in both with a shrug. Elsewhere we had plenty of easy clues to get a toehold in the grid, which for me at least meant that this was a medium level difficulty puzzle, and being Punk of course lively, interesting and enjoyable.
COD? I had a number of ticks beside the clues, 9d in particular being nicely done, with my nomination going to the aforementioned 10ac – “Besides which, I do like to be singing about Tottenham’s first reserve (3,5)”.
All the answers and parsing of the clues can be found in Fifteensquared’s blog from May 2018:
https://www.fifteensquared.net/2018/05/15/independent-9855-by-punk/
Borodin
batarde
Saboteur
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
willow1235
idothei 
In truth I knew both the author and all but one of her books here, but my confidence at being able to guess any beyond 28a was nonexistent.
Then lo-and-behold my colleague Dan (who has young children) mentioned ‘Tiddler’ during morning briefing. Quite a coincidence as that was the one I’d never heard of.
A word search on couple of crossers suggested that the author at 13A was Emily Dickinson, who I’d vaguly heard of. Then a further word search suggested 28A and from that an author I’d not heard of. I suppose I could have used her entry in Wikipedia to find other titles which would fit the spaces but I lost interest.
Thanks for the link to 15^2.
Quite a challenge, I thought. I did know THE GRUFFALO, of course, but not the author nor any of the other books. It was quite difficult resisting just using Wikipedia to find a list. I did just about manage, and went online to check. That made it more like four-star for me.
Otherwise good, meaty stuff from Punk. I did enjoy DECANTER.
Far too old to have heard of the author, Enid Blyton was my childhood reading (now in some deserved disrepute), but cheated successfully via the internet. Otherwise a par solve with no unknowns. NDY
Agreed on the *** rating and the COD choice.
Took a while to identify the author, then knew *some* but not all of the works referenced.
Only one star here, as this was one of those extremely rare occasions when I remember the puzzle from its first appearance in the Indy. And even back then I found it easy, having read the stories with grandchildren.