i Cryptic Crossword 4168 by Serpent
June 15, 2024
Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳⏳
Thoroughly brilliant from Serpent. He’s always very clever (and hard!), but this was out of the very top drawer. Loads of clues were excellent but a few were at crosswording artistry level I thought – the double deletion of INVETERATE, the use of Au and Or for ‘gold-plated’ in AUTHOR; the &Lits of CRUMPET and CHAPEL or indeed the excellent hidden GET OVER in 15a, which had a special resonance for me after smashing up my spine a couple of years ago. Then (and despite my still struggling to get my head fully around it) special mention should also be made for the clue for CATCH at 22a because of how it related to the theme. But top of the crop just has to be this one:
4d What is n, given n plus two could be twelve plus one? (6)
True, it’s a bit of trivia we might well have met in a comic in our schooldays perhaps, but how lovely to weave it into a clue like that; he’s not a Mathematics professor for nothing!
The theme was easy to spot – JOSEPH HELLER (top & bottom rows) had the foresight to give himself the same number of letters in his first and last names – but we also had CLOSING TIME and PICTURE THIS pleasingly positioned on the left and right edges and CATCH at 22. How perfect! That last is the only one here I’ve read and it remains one of my all time favourites. All that grid-filling was achieved with just one obscurity, PERSIFLAGE – which is one of those words that sounds vaguely familiar and I for one will be trying to shoehorn into the conversation at some point over the weekend.
I hope you enjoyed it too – apologies for all those near the beginning of your crosswording lives if it was too tricky; I’m sure that this is the sort of thing you’ll be lapping up in due course.
The answers:
www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/23/independent-10539-by-serpent
Borodin
batarde
Saboteur
Denzo
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
willow1235
idothei 
Yes, great puzzle, with a theme for once spotted! Finished within about the two egg-timers, but this certainly felt on the tough side. One where experience perhaps and a willingness to chuck the answers in and work back to the wordplay paid off.
Re-calibrate your egg-timers Jon!
Indeed. You must have very different eggtimers to mine.🤣
Recalibrating. 🙂
An excellent, satisfying challenge, mostly much less difficult than last Saturday’s from Serpent, although it contained the obscure PERSIFLAGE, a word I never knew rather than one I couldn’t recall.
A few stubborn clues when almost done prompted a look at the unches in the top and bottom row where I saw JOSEP* HELLE*. I immediately entered CATCH at 22a and a visit to Wikipedia made sense of his hitherto puzzling NHO books, CLOSING TIME and PICTURE THIS.
CATCH was a PDM; I also liked the misleading surface of STEELIER and the triple definition of ENTERTAIN. I worked out the CoD by arithmetic. I could see, from the TW in TWO and TWELVE and the common letters in TWELVE and ELEVEN, that there was somethimg clever in the word play, but with most clues still unsolved, did not see how clever until I looked af 225 at the end. Touches like that turn a puzzle otherwise merely excellent into a brilliant one.
Excellent puzzle! Very tough, but so engrossing and really satisfying to complete.
CATCH (at) 22 was great. That was the only book of his that I knew, but that’s what the internet was invented for, I suppose.
wow, someone pickier than me. Get over fine for recover. I’m getting over, I’m recovering – no problems.
(Referring to Dansar’s comment on the other side)
🙂
Well, I DID enjoy that! Lovely clues, although there were quite a few where I put in the answer and worked out the parsing afterwards. PERSIFLAGE is a favourite word of mine, first encountered doing The Mikado at school (a long time ago). But I still haven’t read Catch-22…
Please, please read it.
I found it too bloody-minded fo enjoy, but I could see its appeal, so perhaps I was “in fhe wrong place” to read it.
I remember it being like wading through treacle until I suddenly ‘got’ the humour about 100 pages in and was laughing so much I decided to go back to the beginning and start again!
Sunday solve for me, tough as they come and I’m not sure I would have finished if I hadn’t spotted the theme after twigging 22a. A look at the bottom row showed HEL?E? and I had ????P? along the top, so it was a big help with some of the down clues. I did start to read Catch 22 once but never finished it, can’t remember why.
It was a superb puzzle, of course, as I’ve come to expect from Serpent. I am simply in awe of the mind that can dream up a clue like the CoD, and Maths was my best subject at school!
A Sunday solve here, too. Tough in places but I soon realised the nina was JOSEPH HELLER and the answers down the left and right sides would be titles of his books – so 22 just had to be CATCH. After that the rest fell into place without too much head-scratching.