Listen With Others

Paddock’s third Listener hit us this week, following on from a game of Battleships in 2016 and Ovid’s Metamorphoses last year. Here we had an interesting clueing technique with phrases from book titles had to become part of the clues signified by their word lengths in square brackets.

The first such clue that I got was 14ac Brave Joshua’s first to come out [2 7] after collapse (6) where what looked like HEROIC with J(oshua) gave us of Jericho as the book title bit. I’m afraid I’m not an expert on that Oxford detective, but I recalled that one of the books was [checks Wiki] The Dead of Jericho. That revelation came fairly early in my solve, but little did it help me with the other book titles that we’d need. I knew that the last was going to be The Remorseful Day, but that belonged to the endgame.

A few clues stood out for me:

15ac	CODEX	Against banning new “adults only” book that hasn’t been printed (5) CON – N + X (with the wordplay for DE omitted
19dn	SEEDCASE	Judge going over statements to court accepts conclusion of Raymond Burr, maybe (8) SEE + CASE around (Raymon)D
22dn	FLATLET	Low-rent accommodation (7) FLAT-LET

 
One clue made me shudder with its reference to some bloke:

7dn

AXOIDS

Figures old Tory leader no longer supports a vote (6) O + IDS (say no more) after (A + X)

 
And so the restored clues gave us:

14ac	HEROIC	Brave Joshua’s first to come out [The Dead] of Jericho after collapse (6)
35ac	LENSES	Loony [Last] Seen Wearing extreme pair of ladies’ glasses (6)
6dn	WORDLESS	[The] Silent World [of Nicholas Quinn desolated, being short of energy (8)
10dn	TRACE	Spot one’s Last Bus [to Woodstock] close to midnight, heading north (5)
27dn	HATED	Felt revulsion at shifting [Service of All] the Dead bodies about (5)
33dn	ARMS	Limbs are beginning to suffer around marathon’s [The Riddle of the] Third Mile (4)

 
Finally, the DE from CODEX moved to the LO of LOATH to suggest Death is Now My Neighbour (or at least Paddock’s at 30ac) and the letters from DEATH, FLEURY and MORSE (replacing CODEX) gave us The Remorseful Day.

Thanks for the entertainment, Paddock.
 

This entry was posted on 8 Nov 2019 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Solving Blogs. Tagged: Paddock, The Gaudy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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