Listen With Others

Any setter with a pseudonym from George Smiley’s world gets my interest straight away! Thanks Karla for a fun puzzle!

Here we had a puzzle based on snooker. All eight coloured balls in snooker appeared, with each deleted from an answer to create the grid entry. So:

• [RED] LINE
• [YELLOW] CARD
• [GREEN] BERET
• [BROWN] SHIRTS
• is this one [BLUE] PRINTS (at 13a)?
• [PINK] PANTHER
• [BLACK] MAIL, and
• [WHITE] FLAG

It seemed to be possible to jumble the 12 omitted letters from wordplay to make ONE FOUR SEVEN, the maximum break in snooker.

And the ‘above advice’ from the Preamble might be described as CLUE TIPS. Remove one letter from this to leave CUE TIPS, a more snooker-related phrase.

One of the easier Listeners of the year. Though I perhaps enjoy harder puzzle more, I do love the variety that the Listener dishes up – you really don’t know what you are getting until you get solving!

My thanks to Karla for a nice debut puzzle!

Cheers,

Tim / Encota