Guardian Prize 26,101 / Enigmatist

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Enigmatist: a name to strike fear, I think, into many a Guardian solver’s heart – and not least that of the one down to blog the day’s puzzle, especially if it’s a Prize. However, I always regard it as something of a perk, as well as a challenge, to join battle with this setter: I know it’s going to be tough going but, as far as I remember, it’s always been well worth the struggle.

And so it was with this one. On the first run through, as so often, it looked impenetrable but, once I had the bottom row and the two sides filled in, it yielded fairly steadily – until I ran into the buffers with three left in the bottom right hand corner. However, a couple of hours – and a pub lunch – later, they slipped satisfyingly into place, which left ‘only’ the parsing of a handful of clues to be done. And that was such fun! – lots of cunning constructions and witty wordplay to unravel, with the inevitable accompanying ‘dohs’ and ‘ahas’ along the way.

This is what prize puzzles always used to be like – occupying an absorbingly good proportion of the day but, usually, sorted by bed time. Huge thanks, Enigmatist – it was brilliant and I loved it!

Across

1 Cook’s been able to do this once on time (common gender question posed by society!) (6,3,5)
RETAIN THE ASHES
RE [on] + T [time] + AIN’T HE A SHE? [‘common’ gender question!] + S [society]
Finally parsing this hilarious clue was a real penny-dropping moment! I’m not a cricket follower [I’m more familiar with the differently-spelt writer of ‘Letter from America’] but even I was aware of this event – and I believe there’s another in the offing?

9 Police who want use of crackdown say they are gripping the court! (4,5)
VICE SQUAD
VICES [they are gripping] + QUAD [court]
[We don’t often have to ‘lift and separate’ in the definition but here we need to read it as ‘Police who want use of crack down, say’ – lovely clue!]

10 Sri Lankan port‘s lifeboat’s chief caught in a force 8 (5)
GALLE
L[ifeboat] in GALE [a force 8 wind on the Beaufort Scale]

11 Itinerant #out to lunch (5)
NOMAD
NO [# – number] + MAD [‘out to lunch’]

12 Play this for eventual gain and drag to the ground (4,2,3)
HARD TO GET
Anagram [ground] of DRAG TO THE

13 World traveller’s not doing too well in business with PC? (1-7)
E-TAILING
ET [world traveller] + AILING [not doing too well]

14 High-class clothes business — right time to go for it! (1-5)
A-GRADE
[r]AG [t]RADE [clothes business] minus r [right] and t [time]

17 Fitful earless driving programme through well (4-2)
STOP-GO
TOP G[ear] [earless driving programme!] in [through] SO [well]
[I know I’m always going on about how important surfaces are to me but this one was so outrageously bizarre I just had to laugh!]

19 Look into enclosed space and see transmitter (6,2)
COLOUR TV
LO [look] in COURT [enclosed space] + V[ide] – look
I need help with the definition here

22 On vacation, double-crossed nasty DJ? (5,4)
DRESS CODE
Anagram [nasty] of D[oubl]E [on vacation] + CROSSED

24 International ran laps on record (5)
FILED
FLED [ran] round [laps] I [international]

25 Timeless band’s backing track (5)
SPOOR
Reversal [backing] of [t]ROOP’S [band’s] minus t [time]

26 One intriguing old Spanish gentleman (9)
CABALLERO
CABALLER [one intriguing] + O [old]
I think this is the first time I’ve seen this definition when the answer was not HIDALGO

27 Virginia back, cutting Myra, is getting involved with Gordon — TV feature? (4,5,5)
SNOG MARRY AVOID
Reversal [back] of VA [Virginia] in [cutting] an anagram [getting involved] of MYRA IS and GORDON
I got as far as this on my first run through and hadn’t got a single answer, so, in desperation, I resorted to an anagram solver and couldn’t believe the answer when it came up: I  thought it, too, had failed and just come up with random words, as I’d never heard of this TV programme, I’m not ashamed to say.

Down

1,8 Freshly hassled, gets even: divorces bride — so saying? (7,2,1,4,4,6,4)
REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD
Anagram [freshly] of HASSLED GETS EVEN DIVORCES BRIDE
This wonderfully &littish anagram [and I did work this one out by myself – helped by the enumeration and some crossers] is practically up there with the Araucaria classic: ‘Poetical scene has surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)’ – Bravo, Enigmatist!

2 Old mortar in building programme co-tenant’s brought up (3,4)
TOC EMMA
Hidden reversal [brought up] in progrAMME CO-Tenant
Toc Emma was WWI signallers’ code for TM: trench mortar

3 Mannequins I de-legitimised, having the measure of men’s outfitter (6,3)
INSIDE LEG
Hidden in mannequINS I DE-LEGitimised – what a surface!

4 Moving about (8)
TOUCHING
Double definition – very neat

5 Last divers under base (6)
ENDURE
Anagram [divers] of UNDER + E [base of the natural logarithm]
I don’t remember ever before seeing URE in a crossword when it didn’t refer to my beloved Wensleydale’s river!

6 With intervention of government, this goes up a great deal (5)
SIGHT
G [government] in a reversal [goes up] of THIS

7 Articles praising one in United goal getting drunk after end of game (7)
EULOGIA
I in anagram [getting drunk] of U [united] GOAL after gam[E]

15 Indulge too much in what’s unusually legal of mafioso (9)
GOODFELLA
OD [overdose – indulge too much] in an anagram [unusually] of LEGAL OF

16 “N”, some out of uniform inspiring Sussex resort with no hotel (8)
NOVEMBER
N[u]MBER [some] minus [out of] U [uniform] round [inspiring] [h]OVE – Sussex resort minus h[hotel]
N = November in the NATO phonetic alphabet – and, I realised / remembered later, U = uniform and H = hotel – but I can’t really make sense of the surface!

18 The Queen’s personal circle has no news to broadcast (4,3)
ONE’S OWN
O [circle] + an anagram [broadcast] of NO NEWS

20 Outstanding piece of fiction concerning upset on borders (7)
RELIEVO
[This – ridiculously – took the longest of all to parse. You know how it is when you get an idea in your head and it won’t go away, even though it’s clearly wrong? I got the answer fairly early on but couldn’t get beyond LIE [fiction] bordered by RE [concerning] and ON upset – which made perfect sense but, of course, led to the impossible RELIENO]
It’s LIE [fiction] bordered by a reversal [upset] of OVER [concerning] – Doh!

21 Received refreshment at 4pm on 1/4, oh yesssss! (6)
GOTCHA
GOT [received] CHA [tea – refreshment at 4pm] – said on All Fools’ Day, 1st April [1/4] [That last bit was, appropriately,  the penultimate piece of parsing to dawn on me!]

23 Parents’ progeny? Some of it (5)
SPROG
Hidden in parentS PROGeny:  a deceptively simple clue but a great surface – &lit

38 comments on “Guardian Prize 26,101 / Enigmatist”

  1. Thanks Enigmatist and Eileen.

    This kept me at it for a good while but I got there. I had mainly the same sticking points as Eileen too, needing help with SNOG MARRY AVOID. RELIEVO was about the last for me also.

    I’m still not sure how 9a works: yes the definition gives us vice squad, vices are things which grip, and a quad is a courtyard but that’s about as far as I get.

    COD 1a for me, I liked the stuffing.

  2. Thanks Eileen. It struck fear into me too and I found it a lot more difficult than usual. I’m still not sure of the 19 definition, I would have thought COLOUR TV was a receiver rather than a transmitter and I couldn’t find a definition for EULOGIA which really matched ‘articles praising’.

  3. Thanks Enigmatist and Eileen

    Its been a little while, but what a great Prize puzzle where each clue had to be prised out one by one! GOODFELLA was the last to fall not having watched the film.

    I had the COLOUR TV as being a device that transmits images in colour (and hence a transmitter) – also had the V as the Vatican See.

    Hopefully you will be wrong with another rendition of 1across, but fear that you might’ve right.

  4. Hi Bs,

    I think COLOUR TV is the adjective, which might relate to a given transmitter, rather than a noun. “Type of” seems accepted as a definition from what I’ve come across.

  5. Thanks, Eileen. I’m sure we nearly all had similar solving journeys to you. As you say, a “proper” prize puzzle!

    I agree with the above comments on COLOUR TV – we consumers only see the box, the receiver but there has to be a transmitter too and, indeed, a Google of “colour TV transmitter” gives 440,000 hits…

    I thought VICE SQUAD defined as an anti-drug unit was more of a stretch.

  6. Thanks all
    Just about the toughest G. puzzle I have attempted and I failed to complete 21d and 15d (both non-words); as I said last week I found it so difficcult that I took a break on Sunday and completed Azed.
    It makes a nice change to have a prize puzzle which justifies its status.

  7. It took me all week, until today, to solve this one.

    I still can’t accept TV as being a transmitter. And the police unit that wants use of crack down would be the drug squad, surely, not the vice squad, which deals with prostitution etc. Better not say any more here…

    I didn’t much like caballer either.

    A toughie. The SE corner was the last to go in for me.

  8. Thanks Eileen. 27a was second last in: incredulously I googled it and found there was such a TV show. That left 24a, which had to be FILED. Some excellent clues here, notably the GOODFELLA one. 1a went in rather quickly and painfully: it followed 1,8 for which I retain high hopes.

  9. A nice puzzle for a Saturday.

    Luckily I got the huge 1d 8d anagram on the first pass.

    However the puzzle still proved a nice challenge for the weekend although I did finish it on the Saturday.

    Enigmatist “getting down with the kids” with 13 and 27 across was a nice surprise.

    LOI was 14A when I finally saw the parsing. I’d been considering A-Grade and from Rag Trade for a while but for some reason didn’t see it!

    Thanks to Eileen and Enigmatist

  10. I must be getting used to this setter’s style because I finished it without recourse to aids while I was eating my dinner on Monday evening, and I finished his Thursday effort in the Independent without recourse to aids as well. I thought it was an excellent puzzle with more humour than some of the previous Enigmatist offerings.

    Having said that, I got 1ac from the definition once a couple of checkers were in place and I didn’t bother to try and parse it. It’s a cryptic puzzle so I don’t have a problem with cryptic definitions such as those for COLOUR TV and VICE SQUAD. SNOG MARRY AVOID was my LOI after I recalled seeing it in the TV listings.

  11. Whoops: it beat me after all. I provisionally wrote E-MAILING for 13a and forgot to return to it. I’d never seen the pun on “retailing” written down before so it might have evaded me.

    I’ve got the handle on VICE SQUAD now I’ve spotted the “use of crack down” so thanks Eileen, I must read more carefully. The “they are gripping” seems a clue within a clue, and a conjugated verb rather than a plural noun. I’m not sure what the purist’s take is on that, as I’m perhaps not one.

  12. Hah! It’s been staring me in the face. It is of course the “they” alone, the pronoun, which relates to VICES. Doh…

  13. Thanks Eileen and Enigmatist

    As noted earlier I found this hard. A very good prize puzzle as many others have noted. I particularly liked 14a and 22a.

    I missed e-tailing and wrote in e-mailing without porperly understanding it, so extra thanks Eileen.

    I also failed to parse ‘goodfellas’ properly.

  14. I found this really tough and eventually cheated on TOC EMMA. Failing to write this in, it was only later in the week that I picked up the puzzle and realised 13a could not be E-SELLING, which I had convinced myself was feasible. I should have checked – it does not have a hyphen. I was sorry QUIXOTIC didn’t fit 26ac and when I asked my husband for an old Spanish gentleman he gave me CABALLERO. I did not fill that in for ages as I could not parse it, like many other of my eventual solutions. Thanks so much Eileen for all the explanations.
    Finally, never mind SNOG,MARRY,AVOID (which I was blissfully unaware of), I was overjoyed to write in my favourite Klingon proverb from Star Trek II:The Wrath of Khan, REVENGE IS A DISH BST SERVED COLD!

  16. Great stuff as ever.

    I am curious about an anagram tool that has such answers in its database – Eileen, could you provide a link?

    Many Thanks

  17. We had E-MAILING too, in spite of not being able to parse it. But then I couldn’t parse several others (1a, 9a, 22a, 20d), and they turned out to be right!

    Always rather dis-satisfying when that happens, but I guess we’re not all up to Enigmatist’s (and Eileen’s !) standard…

  19. As usual Eileen agree on matters cruciverbal and her intro says it all. The SE corner put up the longest fight especially the ‘transmitter’ at 19d.

    Thanks to lucky Eileen and to Enigmatist for a proper treat of a prize puzzle.

  20. I thought I’d done very well to finish this since I was out of contact with any dictionary or online assistance. So it was annoying to find that E-MAILING was wrong.

    But thanks for a really excellent workout.

  21. Thanks, Eileen.

    A proper prize puzzle for once. It did take me a while, but I found that it yielded steadily.

    The long anagram took a while to see (spotting DISH was the key for me), and was one of my favourites, together with the cleverly constructed A-GRADE. However, I got SNOG, MARRY, AVOID quite quickly. I’ve never seen the programme but it has a memorable title which I have seen when scanning the schedules for something that might be worth watching. EULOGIA was new to me but it had too be this; EULOGIES was too long, and I couldn’t see how ENCOMIA worked! I’m another who slapped E-MAILING in without understanding why.

    Last in for me was also RILIEVO.

    Nice one, Enigmatist. Being 50 clearly hasn’t blunted your skills.

  22. 50/50 for this one, congratulations John! My computer struggled with this but eventually prevailed, although I was another E-MAILING person, never having heard of E-TAILING.

    Thanks Eileen; Wiki gives this for VICE SQUAD: ‘A vice squad, also called a vice unit or a morality squad, is a police division whose focus is stopping moral crimes like gambling, narcotics, pornography and illegal sales of alcohol.’ I guess that covers the points above.

    It will probably be another 50 years before I can solve an Enigmatist puzzle unaided, but I still enjoyed the triumph of completion, and parsing most of it. 🙂

  23. Great puzzle, which I only completed this morning after filling in 19a. I had been fixated all week on thinking I was looking for a satellite sort of thing floating around in space with a name ending in IV. It was only doing last Saturday’s Bannsider prize in the Indy via Crossword Solver today that made me realize TV was a possibility. Doh indeed!

    A tough puzzle, as you would expect, but a very enjoyable tussle. The bottom half was looking embarrassingly empty for quite a while until SNOG MARRY AVOID somehow floated into my mind.

    Earless driving programmes and de-legitimised mannequins? Whatever next? 🙂

    Thanks for the blog, Eileen. Your help was needed for the full parsing of some of these.

  24. John Henderson has a setting history of 35 years while I have a solving history of only 5 years, so it is a bit bold to say that this was his Best Week Ever.
    But boy oh girl, his Trilogy (this one, Wednesday’s IO and Nimrod the day after) was truly wonderful.

    This particular puzzle (as were the others [contradictio in terminis]) was a marvellous piece of crossword setting!

    We solved it far away from resources with a few cups of coffee at hand (in, of all places, a garden centre) within two hours.
    After entering the last clue we almost jumped for joy.
    This is (sometimes) what solving is all about – hard work, ah oh and doh.

    I was even willing to take ‘e’ defined as ‘base’ in 5d for granted. When looking at logarithms any positive number is a ‘base’ (although ‘e’, of course, is a special one).

    In the recent Nimrod the only clue I couldn’t parse was EMMA – apparently it used to stand for M.
    What a coincidence to find M as part of TM here (2d).

    And anagrams don’t come better than in 1/8, do they?
    Agree with you, Eileen, about the ‘hilarious’ start of this crossword.
    One that was a real treat.

  25. Biggles A @2

    I don’t think anybody has answered you so:

    EULOGIA is the plural of EULOGIUM (any word for EULOGY)

  27. Thanks Brendan (not that one). The answer was plain enough of course but I couldn’t get past the Eucharist definition. Quite different words apparently.

  28. The AINT HE A SHE in 1ac is a great setterly spot in a great puzzle. 1dn 8 is also brilliant, but one thing it is probably not is &lit: there’s a definition plus wordplay there, innit, which kind of alerts one to possible unandlittishness.

    Bloody quick divorce ‘n’ all if I may say so.

  31. A toughie. Needed Google for confirmation of 27a, and still not convinced by ‘colour tv’ as a transmitter, but that’s a minor quibble. Don’t know how long it took, but very satisfying to complete, even if resort to an aid for confirmation was needed.

  32. Very enjoyable puzzle.
    Does any one else have qualms about “out to lunch” to mean “mad” (11 ac.)?
    I have seen it once before here and it makes me uneasy, as with all disrespectful remarks about people. In any case, it does not really work, since “out to lunch” has the same meaning as “nobody at home” or “nothing between the ears” and a host of other quite dreadful ways of making fun of people who have limited intellectual capacity. It certainly does mean “mad” and any link between mental incapacity and neurosis is deplorable.

  33. 32 Chris:

    I think “out to lunch” means, conversationally, given to folly, rather than of limited IQ, and so does mean “mad” in that vein. I suppose it suggests someone has abandoned a position of normal restraint, and is no longer to be found there.

    As “mad” is not a professionally recognised term anyway, I don’t think there’s much here to bother us unduly.

  34. I think, on reflection, I am too sensitive about “out to lunch”. I can well see that it could be used to mean absent-minded or inattentive, as my children might well describe me when I am in a brown study (that shows my age). Not quite mad, but nonetheless, distrait.

  35. Mary

    26,101 is the first I haven’t finished for ages. However, it looks as though 26,107 will be the second as I am stuck on six clues. Are they getting harder or is my brain getting feeble????

    I thought 11ac, was a really good clue. (26,101)

    Why do I have to do the sum?

  36. Hi Mary @35
    “Why do I have to do the sum?”

    To prove that you are human and not a spambot. The number of spam comments the site receives was increasing steadily until it reached a peak of nearly 100,000 a month in August 2011. Though Akismet, the spam filter, is very good at preventing the vast majority of spam from appearing on the site, it is still wasteful of server resources so I have taken several measures to reduce the volume of spam, including the introduction of a Captcha. These have caused the spam levels to drop progressively to the current figure of just under 40,000 a month.

  37. Hi Gaufrid@36

    How awful that you have to deal with so much spam. I’m willing to do any amount of maths to help you.

    re Mary @ 35
    I should have said that I only do the Saturday prize crosswords; not every one.

  38. FINALLY got around to finishing this today! Loved it, but do have to share others’ unease over the colour TV definition.

    As a (relative) nipper I had no problems with SNOG MARRY AVOID or E-TAILING, but did have to resort to help for RELIEVO.

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