Agatha Christie was a favourite of mine during my teenage years and for a long time afterwards. So I am ashamed at the length of time it took me to realise that the presence of “N or M”, “Towards Zero” and “Endless Night” was no coincidence! Well done Wan for slipping them in so effortlessly.

In my defence I was distracted by “plain” in the hidden message “the author and works in plain clues”, thinking “are we going to have to encrypt/decrypt this lot?” Once I interpreted “plain” as unaltered the works revealed themselves, although I did not find either the author or one of her works in 17dn.

I then had to make the leap from Christie to SAUSAGE MACHINE – never was a hint like banger more needed. Fortunately Google threw up the quote, which was new to me.

My favourite clues were 36ac for its juxtaposition of Set square; 37ac for its clever incorporation of Murder is Easy; and 38ac for hiding the “k” so effectively – Mass was not the first word I arrived at when removing an extra letter. In 9dn I spent a good while trying to spot the anagram, and I’m still not convinced I’ve parsed it correctly. Fortunately I had enough crossing letters to give me UNALTERED.

The final picture of half a dozen sausages – including SNAG, which I’d never heard of – being extruded from the sausage machine made all the effort worthwhile and brought a smile to my face.

Thank you Wan for a demanding, interesting, fun solve – and the satisfaction of finding all the bangers!

Gill