Oh dear, it’s Dysart again! This is the setter who caused me so much wailing and gnashing of teeth last July when his Father Brown puzzle brought my run of 120+ correct Listeners to a screeching halt. Since then, I have had a handful of other failures or silly mistakes, including the unforgivable omission of the highlighting of some stupid carrots!

Anyway, to the task in hand … to somehow beat Dysart this week.

For the first time in what seems an age, the clues were all normal, all entries were to be entered without adulteration, and there were no clashes. In the finished grid, an author and his place of birth would be obvious, together with four of his works. An easy week lay ahead!

I won’t do my usual trick of giving the first clues I solved followed by a statement to the effect that “everything was pretty straightforward after that”. This is mainly because most of the clues were tricky and some held me up for quite a long while.

Instead I’ll just mention the last few clues I got — ones that gave obvious answers, but where the wordplay eluded me for quite a while.

34ac held be up for some time early on because I stupidly just put in IAMBI instead of IAMBS! This made 28dn M-I-S-E-S totally impossible!

15ac Amphibian, name unknown, caught by a thrust was ANURAN … NU (name unknown) in A + RAN (where ‘thrust’ is to be read not as a noun or even the present tense, but the past tense).

45ac Memo: “A person with no regular income is out of the question!” gave NOTE (NOT E); this clue introduced me to E meaning a person with no regular income which I’d not encountered before.

And then there were two clues which completely stumped me: 5dn and 8dn. 5dn was “Traveller’s Rest” perhaps seen to supply cups which was STOPOVER, and 8dn The star entertainer in the line-up could tell you how to get this fruit for ANANA. Help needed on those please.

Finally the end game, and we had to find the author, FRANZ KAFKA and his place of birth, PRAGUE. Of course, we were supposed to think “No Prague, but I know that in the Czech Republic it’s PRAHA”! The trouble is that that wasn’t in the grid either. I spotted JUMBO in a diagonal, but that didn’t help, although I slotted it away for almost certain use at some point.

For me, it was about 30 minutes of floundering before I wondered if Dysart was playing a delicious trick, and I eventually found the Japanese author HARUKI MURAKAMI in the main NE-SW diagonal and near the top of the grid was his birthplace KYOTO. Bingo! And now to find his cryptically represented novels. Dance, Dance, Dance was there as 3 REELS, the 3 being the only number to be entered in the grid; KAFKA ON THE SHORE was there in rows 10 and 11. The third novel to be highlighted took me forever to find. Was it Norwegian Wood or Sputnik Sweetheart or After Dark, all of which gave ample opportunity for cryptic representation? Eventually I spotted NOR OAK in row 5 and breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, as suspected, The Elephant Vanishes required JUMBO to be erased.

So, this week, I got the better of Dysart, but he certainly tried hard. A really enjoyable and entertaining puzzle, so many thanks to him for that.

This week we had a second Listener puzzle from Tangram, with the first being just over a year ago. That featured Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind: “O, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Looking out of the window, all I can say about this spring is that it’s wet and windy, so ideal crosswording weather!

A straightforward Letters Latent puzzle here, with subsidiary idications leading to the entered answers. I hoped that his would be fairly straightforward, and I was off to a reasonable start with 16ac STEERABLE entered as STRABL, 19ac LIMACEL entered as LIACEL and 27ac NEEDS, NEES. 33ac Poet’s apparently removing from funeral stand as urn nigh prepared was an obvious anagram, and I guessed that a 10- or more letterd word would have at least one E, and it probably ended with –ING. I got UNH[E]ARSING fairly quickly after that.

The down clues were helped by 6dn Ruined Ionian city, having buried year sign which was an anagram of Ionian city without the Y for year. ATION was almost staring me in the face, and IN[D]ICATION was slotted into the grid.

Steady progress was made with Tangram’s puzzle, but the question posed by the latent letters was slow coming. I don’t know whether we were supposed to get befuddled over the last few letters of the across clues, but I certainly was: GEDIOOFE. Something must be wrong, but of course, it wasn’t, and soon everything was made clear:

Which poem, aged IOO featured a moonlit door?

With a little licence, the IOO becomes 100. I confess that I needed Google to remind me about the moonlit door, but Walter de la Mare’s “Is there anybody there said the traveller”, the opening line from The Listeners, immediately brought back memories of my childhood … although exactly when it was, I’m not sure. Then, as now, it sent a tingle down my spine as I read it.

All that remained was to find THE LISTENERS in the grid, and there they were, minus the L in column 10. Thus the letter making it “homologous with the title” was the L, and it could also be fitted in the title of our puzzle to give Cluemasters, perhaps a reference to Listener setters.

So thanks to Tangram for a very enjoyable puzzle and some good memories, and not too taxing after last week’s tussle with Elgin.