Yahoo News Crossword roundup: the real-life Darby (and Joan?)
In the sample clues below, the links take you to explainers from our beginners’ series. The setter’s name often links to an interview with him or her, in case you feel like getting to know these people better.
The news in clues
I’d like to think that Tees’ use of “clatter” …
22/10a His clatter was endlessly fantastic (7,5)
[definition: the whole clue]
[wordplay: anagram (“fantastic”) of almost all of (“endlessly”) HISCLATTERWAS]
… to describe the noises made by recently departed CHARLIE WATTS would be appreciated by the self-deprecating drummer himself. Which reminds me: just as Dave Gorman has become a cryptic setter during the pandemic, so has the Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield started painstakingly compiling music-themed non-cryptics:
I put the answers crisscrossing each other on the grid until I’d used up every answer, then I redrew the grid and colour-coded the box with oaks and sepia tones, a faded tapioca yellow and charcoal greys, and bam, I was there!
If you’d be interested in a chat or a puzzle here from Mr Bradfield, we will try to arrange. The previous day in the Independent, some of us might have solved this clue from the setter known in the Guardian as Vlad …
8/30a Delayed restrictions of movement – clown does talk rubbish (4,9)
[definition: delayed restrictions of movement]
[wordplay: anagram (“rubbish”) of CLOWNDOESTALK]
… and pondered the effect of LATE LOCKDOWNS, but not noticed the extra pointed comment hidden in unclued rows.
Latter patter
For lovers of mysteries and misdirection, a recommended watch for a pandemic or any time is Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, which features the law firm Stark, Coe and Fellows. This paper calls it …
A movie that had the power of Greek tragedy while remaining true to its pulp fiction roots
… in an obituary of screenwriter Donald Westlake, who used a mind-bogglingly vast number of noms de guerre, including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe and various other … fellows.
As Coe, he also stars in the Oxford English Dictionary as their earliest citation for a term, clued in her typically succinct style by Nutmeg:
11a One thing or a couple? (4)
[double definition]
That citation for ITEM comes in Coe’s 1970 novel A Jade in Aries. So did we start talking about “an item” – in the sense of the second of Nutmeg’s definitions – in the late 1960s?
Well, no. I adore Oxford’s dictionaries. I tackled school with the concise; I had the compact with the magnifying glass at my side as I learned cryptics, and my first large purchase with my own money was the two-volume shorter. I use them for pretty much everything, but not for finding out when a slangy term was first used.
For that, we go of course to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which takes us to a different novelist (Budd Schulberg) who wrote a different screenplay (On the Waterfront), whose novel with the line “You two are still an item, aren’t you?” is from way back in 1941.
Both dictionaries give the same first citation for the subject of our next challenge, both expressing mild frustration at not knowing whether it goes back further than a verse titled The Joys of Love Never Forgot in a 1735 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine. Also used as cockney slang for “alone”: reader, how would you clue DARBY AND JOAN?
(Incidentally, the Dictionary of National Biography tells us that the author of the verse, Henry Woodfall, “had been apprenticed to the printer John Darby”, but I’m not sure what to do with this information, if anything.)
Cluing competition
Many thanks for your clues for CALLIOPE; the letters proved nicely versatile and I’m glad we didn’t go with Polyhymnia. The audacity award must go to Newlaplandes for making me imagine what was being depicted in “Polemical novel renouncing male organ”.
The runners-up are PeterMooreFuller’s devious “LA police set off the mother of all sirens?” and Magumboots’ evocative “Muse quietly after everyone I love is embraced by church”; the winner is Thepoisonedgift’s so-apt-the-muse-will-surely-inspire-others “Name that is inspiring work?”
Kludos to Gift; please leave entries for this fortnight’s competition – and your picks from the broadsheet cryptics – below.
The latest in our collaborative playlist Healing Music Recorded in 2020-21 to Accompany a Solve or Even Listen To is from Australian guitarist Stephanie Jones.
Clue of the Fortnight
Who has Bond fever? I do.
1a Apt reading Bond created (10,4)
[definition: the last three words of the clue, or possibly all of them]
[wordplay: anagram (“created”) of APTREADINGBOND]
And, like Maskarade, I also have it for the other Bond. Michael. Stay safe.
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop.
Here is a collection of all our explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs.
