One of the stalwarts of the crossword world this week, and it was almost certain that we were in for an entertaining puzzle. We were greeted by misprints and extra wordplay letters (30 in total), missing wordplay letters (three), and a clash (one). The misprint corrections were to be converted to numbers helping to draw eleven straight lines in the grid.

1ac was SEISM. Thanks, Samuel… off to a quick start. I switched to the downs. 1dn Tiddler’s sister wearing silk? Quite the opposite (7) wasn’t as obvious, especially as I assumed the corrected misprint would be ‘Toddler’. Luckily, 2dn EOAN, 3 IMP and 4 SPRIG were easier. I decided to carry on with the down clues, since 4ac New trainer’s allowed in flying post (9, two words) eluded me. 5 ASPER, 8 ELTS and 9 TIE didn’t though, and returning to 4ac, I could now see AIR LETTER.

10dn TAUTOMER must be the sort of word that setters dread, especially if a misprint needs to be hidden. Chambers gives tautomer as “(chem) n a readily inconvertible isomer” with isomer “(chem) n a substance, radical, or ion isomeric with another; an atomic nucleus having the same atomic number and mass as another or others but a different energy state”. My brain felt the strain just typing that! Samuel gives us “substance converted to another by switching ponds bonds”. (I suspect Samuel used How to Bluff Yourself in Chemistry.)

My solving went fairly smoothly with only one slight mistake on the way. For 33dn In Miami, agent cracking down on supply of slow cargo transport rolled up first (4), which was obviously NARC, I had the corrected misprint as ‘snow’ (cocaine, morphine or heroin) as opposed to ‘blow’ (cannabis in British slang or cocaine in the US). That would have meant that my final line segment would have gone hurtling towards and off the left edge of the grid.

Eventually, all the directions given by the extra letters in the wordplay (N, SE, NE, etc) and values given by the misprint corrections, enabled a large MAP to be spelt out, starting with the O of OORT or the A of SAWED.

I suppose there were two ways of now reaching the correct conclusion:

• Consider what MAP, COMPASS (the unclued 12ac) and SENSE OF DIRECTION (40 41) could help with;
• Suspect that there were other clues in the grid and realise why the O was at the start of the lines that spelt out MAP

I was in the first camp. Although I toyed with Treasure Hunt for some time (also 12 letters, but we’d have been told it was two words), ORIENTEERING wasn’t too far behind. This was confirmed by using the O of OORT, rather than the A of SAWED, which became SOWED; the other way round would have presented AORT as a non-word.

So, having used the O, I was still baffled as to how the rest of the word was spelt out in the grid. Since I was going to be away in France for the weekend before this blog appeared, I decided to get a head start on the animation above. It was only then that I saw the letters that my line segments passed through and all became clear. Excellent.

My favourite clues this week were 25dn Without strip? Order to leave the pitch (7, two words) for SEND OFF (SEN DOFF), and 35dn 1970s band win in, missing the end of Alan Wells’ perfect race? (4) for ELOI. Oh yes, and 21dn Expert team could produce autoerotism with this (8) for VIRTUOSO (V missing from wordplay)!

Thanks, Samuel, As hoped, an entertaining and enjoyable puzzle.
 

One of the more prolific setters of recent years greeted us this week, although this was only his fifth Listener following on from Six Characters in Search of an Author theme last year, courtesy of Pirandello. An extra word in each of the down clues and extra phrases in six acrosses needed to be extracted. Themetically-placed letters in the down clues’ words would spell out something meaningful.

1ac Distracting translation in personal record (12) was relatively straightforward, but I didn’t get it! I tried 1dn Either date a risk, and we only had a choice of four for the extra word, and ‘either’ seemed likely giving DARE for the answer. Back to 1ac and DIVERSIONARY got the thumbs up this time. I-BEAMS, REVERT, ORACHE and ASUNDER dropping down from 1ac meant that I was up and running.

I went back for some across clues and 13 was EVOVAE and 15 Dubious creed abject Sun editor backed (7) seemed to give RECEDED, but ‘abject Sun’ seemed to be my first extra phrase intruding into the clue. It looked as though it might be an anagram, but of what proved problematic. Similarly, 17ac Shared mobile can be just for one who loads tones, possibly (6) didn’t seem quite right for SHADER. It took a few minutes for me to realise that ‘can be just’ was both superfluous and also an anagram of ‘abject sun’… or rather both were anagrams of something else. 20 The best possible start to enterprise? Extremely casual hope (5) had a superfluous ‘casual hope’ if the answer were to be EVERY.

At this point, I’m afraid that a bit of anagram help seemed appropriate, and ACEPHALOUS for headless and SUBJACENT meaning bottomless seemed to be trying to tell me something.

And so, after 45 minutes, I was well into the solve, and the thematic letters in the extra down words were obviously their heads and bottoms, and so far I had most of Erase some let…, and it didn’t take long to identify ters from grid, followed by Reorder to single words from words in the remaining down clues. This last bit told me what I already knew, namely that the superfluous phrases in the across clues needed to be unjumbled.

From there on the grid was finished pretty quickly. The six phrases from the acrosses gave two APTERALs, two ACEPHALOUSes, and two SUBJACENTs. These mean ‘wingless’, ‘headless’ and ‘bottomless’ respectively. This reflected that all the entries could become new words if they lost the letter that strayed anywhere into the perimeter.

It didn’t take long to see PROMETHEUS lurking in the main SW–NE diagonal with E and T filling the two barred-off cells. The two related works required by the perimeter were thus Prometheus Bound (Fast) and Prometheus Unbound (Loose), works attributed to AESCHYLUS who was promptly written under the grid.

It thus became necessary to erase the letters of each entry that strayed into the perimeter. Indeed, with the meanings of the six phrases, the whole of the perimeter was erased, thus ensuring that the grid was headless, bottomless and wingless.

Although this was a relatively easy puzzle from Ifor, it was nonetheless very entertaining as have been all his Listeners. Many thanks.