I thought we had tectonic plates last year! Perhaps Shark and the editors had forgotten about Phi’s tricky puzzle. Unlikely, so I guessed it had nothing to do with the way our planet is constantly being reformed. So what did Shark have in strore for us with his debut Listener. He has had a fair smattering of Inquisitors, EVs and Magpies. I have done a few of these, and have certainly enjoyed them.

With the across clues here, entries had to be jumbled before entry, which is what the wordplay led to. My initial reaction was that this would make it fairly easy, but a lot would depend on how tricky the clues were. Every down entry could be prefixed with an adjective, and they all had something in common, except one. That one would determine the highlighting that we were to make in the finished grid.

Starting on the acrosses as usual, 15ac Hammer almost hit salesmen (7), and the wordplay unequivocally gave SLOSREP. This was basically because I misread it as ‘salesman’ and had SLOS[H] + REP as the wordplay, instead of SLO[G] + REPS. Luckily the mistake came to light a mere hour and a half later! This also helps to explain why, for me, the grid was filled pretty much from the bottom upwards.

I was highly impressed with the clues which, for the most part, had nice surface readings. My favourite was probably See criminal lie to son to get flowers (7) leading to VIOLETS (V + LIETO* + S). That’s just my sense of humour, I’m afraid.

After about 2½ hours, the grid was complete, but there seemed to be no initial connection between all the down entries. What could MUSTARD and NEEDLES have in common? COLLOPS at 12dn looked like the way in, but Chambers only gives Collop Monday and minced collops. After a few minutes, SASH, DOOR and FRIES in column 6 came to the rescue. All those could be prefixed by French, as could HEEL, LOAF and POX (!) elsewhere in the grid. Given the title, I looked up other European countries in Chambers, and felt suitably smug as all the other associations came to light. I think the one that I liked the most, since I’d not come across it before, was German Ocean – their name for the North Sea It made me feel a little less guilty about calling La Manche the English Channel!

After a good deal of thumbing through Chambers for European countries, I was left with the odd one out … VIOLETS, which could only be prefixed by AFRICAN. Now I’m sure that if I’d constructed this puzzle, I would have just asked solvers to write it in a space under the grid captioned Odd Man Out and left it at that. But not Shark. He positioned down entries such that after highlighting all the letters of AFRICA in the grid, we had a lovely outline of the continent. Did this self-imposed constraint make the puzzle ten times more difficult to construct? Perhaps Shark will tell us.
 

The first new Listener setter of the year is Ron, and it looks like the puzzle could turn out to be a maze, given the ‘exit’ arrow in the square protruding from the end of the bottom row. Other than that, normal fare, with answers that require thematic treatment, clues that have an extra word, and clues where correct letters for misprints spell out a message.

1ac Kind Oswald Mosley, going berserk after mislaying dolly’s potty, was dreadful (6) was a good place to start. It really only needed confirmation that AWSOME was an alternative spelling, and indeed ‘was dreadful’ was a suitable indication that it was an obsolete word. It’s nice that you can see a phrase in a crossword clue that you wouldn’t expect to see anywhere else, and ‘kind’ isn’t an adjective you would immediately associate with the 30′s fascist, but no doubt he was some (or even most) of the time. Still, ‘kind’ was the extra word that needed to be removed before solving.

14ac Notice changes for intellectual era (6) led to NOETIC with ‘era’ as an extra word, and that was it for the acrosses. With the worrying ‘numbers in brackets refer to lengths of grid entries’ in the preamble, probably referring to the seven across answers requiring modification before entry, it wasn’t surprising I solved so few. I find incorrect enumeration a real bummer. (It’s a frequent EV gremlin!)

The downs started well, with WOLF CUB at 2 and EECH at 5. I double-checked that the latter was an alternative spelling of ECHE, and promptly pencilled ECHE into the grid! That mistake wouldn’t come to light for about 30 minutes when I solved the first clue where the answer required modification, 11ac DOUBLE-BOTTOM. This was four letters too long for its entry, and needed to fit with DOUBLE••M, meaning either BOTT or OTTO needed to be dropped. My money was on OTTO.

This was pretty much confirmed with 6ac RE-ELEVATE needing to fit with REEL••, and EVA saying bye-bye. I guessed that this was going to be a tribute to the appendix of Some first names recently dropped from Chambers! (While writing this blog, I misread my notes, and was surprised to find out that re-evaluate is nowhere to be found in Chambers. In my view, it is a far more widely used word than re-elevate. I shall write and complain to Jeremy Paxman — who also failed to make the latest edition!)

Progress was reasonably quick, and the theme was gradually revealing itself. The central batch of correct letters in the down clues was ten-finger, and in the bottom line of the grid I had PI, obviously leading to PIANO. So we were dealing with kiddies’ piano exercises, a subject of which I have absolutely no knowledge, and a situation that continues to this day given the true nature of the puzzle!

Yes, eventually PIED PIPER appeared in the bottom row, and there behind him were all the children who had been taken from the seven across answers, in order:

EVA    OTTO    ANKE    MAX    ELSA    RALF    ERNST

The ‘scenario’ spelt out by the extra words in the across clues was: Kinder abandon homes pursuing performer. Whether ‘kinder’, German for ‘children’, was supposed to be enough to alert us to the language in which the down clues’ message was written, I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t enough for me (although it did explain why the names were mostly foreign). Having spent ages wondering what could possibly begin Derra, it was the ending Hameln that gave it away. The message finally read:

Der Rattenfanger von Hameln

There were some good clues along the way. My favourite was probably 36dn Guy, originally without children, pens intro to Annie’s Song (4) leading to GASP … misprint Song for Long; G (Guy, originally) + SP (without children) holding A (intro to Annie). The one that held me up the most was 3dn Canon, perhaps Roman Catholic rector, accepting biblical favour, is taken in by bedevilled Faust (12) giving SURFACE-CRAFT … misprint Canon for Canoe; RC (Roman Catholic) R (rector) holding FACE (biblical favour) in FAUST*.

This was great fun, and a nice implementation from Ron of the Pied Piper theme.