Listen With Others

“Rather a long preamble”, we said,”and that setter name is new to us. A beginner?” (Later, we decided this must be a combination of a couple of setters or more – it showed all the signs of experienced compilers.) All the same, does he or she, or do they qualify as Listener setter oenophiles? A run through the clues gives a decided “Yes”.

‘Treated rum imbibed by half cut serf (5)’ We decide that treated rum must be ODD and we put it into SE(rf) (that’s after we have realised that this must be one of the clues where the solution has to be entered jumbled) and SODDE goes into our grid. Then we find that a ‘More horrid drunk abruptly rejected test (8)’ We cut the LUSH short and ‘reject’ him, giving SUL and add TRIER as the test, giving SULTRIER (and a T corrected misprint in ‘more torrid’). A horrid drunk with treated rum – not impressive yet, but then we find ‘Registering full case of gin (8)’ That’s more like it Android. Cheers! ENTIRE with the ‘case’ of GIN (GN) gives us a jumble of ENTERING.

It is lucky for us that the corrected wrong letters in the definitions soon spelled out a familiar quotation, ‘Tell me what thy lordly name is!’ so that we had some idea which solutions were to be entered as jumbles, though the ‘sensible’ answer CORVUS CORAX didn’t appear at once. The other Numpty, by then, had disappeared to prepare the dinner, muttering about the absurdity of Poe’s use of ‘Quoth’ and the ‘night’s Plutonian shore’ and his obsession with ‘Lenore’.

Full grid and the words GHASTLY, GRIM and ANCIENT, together with the poet, POE, outlining a sort of raven but then came the astonishingly clever part. As I carefully transferred those 29 cells and stood them on PALLAS, all the moved letters not only produced real words but also left them. (I was tempted to ‘overwrite’ the O of OUST too to give the BUST but realized that would not obey the statement that ‘the final grid contains only real words ‘LBIRE’ is not a word.) A stunning debut, Android, or a very clever joint compilation. Thank you.