The winners of the November puzzle are Jenny & James Hatchell.
Someone will correct me if wrong, but this is the first Alphabetical Jigsaw (AJ) which I recall seeing in the 3D Calendar. I enjoy them very much: they present a different sort of challenge, while obviously offering crucial help, in that one knows — more or less — the initial letter of each item.
Since they may be new to some solvers, I will just explain my own procedure for solving them. I first established that there were three 9-letter words, of which one would have a C as third or seventh letter. Solving those three clues would clearly give a good start. And — what do you know? — the devious Soup had made sure that the nine-letter words’ clues were among the most difficult, clapping a stopper over that caper. Next, I counted the seven-letter words, though they offered no immediate help. RATTLED was my first solution, going with ALIBI and CHUMP, LOOSE and YOGIS. But it was a long time before anything could be written in the grid.
With 33 clues for 26 letters, it was clearly useful to try to solve some, spaced out in the alphabet, in order to establish which letters might be used more than once. There were nice helpful runs from FLIES to IMMIX and from JEEPS to MACHO. The seven-letter words eventually all gave way. At this point I should mention the lovely clue for PRE-SHOW. Those Whooper swans I imagined trying to get through their dessert quickly before settling down to watch the ballet; but the real distinction was in Soup’s finding that anagram-plus as being suitable. My favourite clue up to that point was, however, the one for CAJUN: LA is a beautiful misdirection.
By this stage I had twenty-odd solutions, and felt I must take the plunge — you have to, at some point, but should always use a pencil, and make sure you use a double crossing-out system to identify clues whose solutions have firstly been found, then entered. CAJUN, JAMMING and JEEPS allowed me to establish with a fair certainty that the J must be on one corner of the middle layer: ‘Power tiles’ to use the Scrabble parlance, are always very helpful, and Soup had given us a big leg-up with that multiple use of the J. The other thing which was necessary for a correct solution was that bit of asymmetry provided by the pre-filled A. I would assume that, since our puzzles allow words to be entered in reverse and to rise as well as fall, without that we could have had two possible solutions, both requiring more guesswork than one would wish. Thanks, then, to Soup or his editor for providing that. For what good it did me…
My technique, thus far, had probably been faultless, and permitted the filling of the middle layer, once ZECCHINOS had been checked with Chambers. However, I then proceeded to waste many minutes in looking for a word **JA* — some sort of O*JAM, or a more exotic (and non-existent) word such as the Mexican cider known as oljan‡ or similar, forgetting that I could simply put in CAJUN and go on to the top layer with its helpful C-words.
QUAVERING was a late find for me, and my last ones in were some of the best clues of the lot: BILLHOOKS — I was looking for some sort of lumberjack type for ages — and DEIGN — an acrostic or a hidden clue, where the solution is visible in plain sight, has to feature brilliant misdirection to work, and here that was accomplished by the inclusion of iron, which sends you off on a wild-Fe chase, and not, which just gets ignored — and finally WINDY, which misdirects because of the non-homophone (these days) of two of the meanings of wind. The cider girl was, of course, Laurie Lee’s Rosie, and the OSIER tree was, I suppose, justifiably ‘sticky’ since sticks from it are used for all those lovely baskets one resolves one day to make for oneself at a tenth of the cost, but never does.
I could perhaps take Soup to task on his use of NEXUSES, where Chambers insists on the plural nexūs; however, his word is attested in many places online, so we shall not complain too much.
The yellow cells form an appropriate and timely tribute to the inventor of the Alphabetical Jigsaw, the late and great John Galbraith Graham (Araucaria) who died ten years ago on 26th November. In the world of Cryptics we all owe him so much.
A beautifully domestic note was established by the photograph of Alphabetti spaghetti on toast from Graham Fox — your monthly tip: butter and Marmite the toast first — and the superb visual clue from Frank Paul. Although (as usual) your reviewer did not solve it (CC in HEINZ* + OS) in real time, it was highly appreciated retrospectively, and praised by Mrs Reviewer, who rarely opens a tin of any kind, except of tuna for a very fussy cat. The tin should of course have been one of Symington’s (the Y being long, as in rhyming) but no doubt the setter will forgive that.
Upon which recklessly informative note, your reviewer thanks you for reading him for the last two years (‘if’, as the late John Ebdon used to say so memorably, ‘you have been’) and hangs up his mouse, having Other Things To Do. It has been a great pleasure.
We wish all our solvers and supporters the warmest of season's greetings for Christmas 2023 and hope that you enjoy our 2024 Calendar over the next 12 months. We have received gracious thanks from both RNIB and BBC CiNA for our 2023 donations and through this greeting would like to share their thanks with you all. We are also delighted to share with you the very good news that we have already passed the 2023 figure for revenue generated from the sale of the 2024 calendar with a month of sales still to go.
Thank you all so much.
The 3D Crossword Calendar team.
Upcoming deadlines
Entries for the December puzzle by Komorník are due by December 31.
