Thursday, May 14, 2009 (DT 25822)

Puzzle originally published Saturday, January 10, 2009 in the Daily Telegraph

Introduction

This is definitely a red-letter day for me. Not only was I able to complete the puzzle without resorting to any of the online "cheat" sites, I also understood (just barely) all the wordplay.

Tip of the Day

One of the items in my Tool Chest that I find quite useful is an Anagram Solver. This tool provides a list of anagrams for a given string of letters. If the one I have included in my Tool Chest does not appeal to you, you can find any number of other such tools on the Internet by entering terms such as "anagram solver" or "anagram engine" in your favourite search engine.

Today's Links

For a solution to today's puzzle, see Crossword Ends in Violence (5) [DT 25822]. Don't be put off by the opening cryptic clue. You have not arrived at the wrong page, it is merely a promo for the author's book.

There is some discussion on CEIV today regarding the appropriateness of publishing solutions to prize puzzles prior to the submission date. You may recall that Cryptics.co.uk does not publish a solution to the Saturday prize puzzle, deeming it would not "be cricket" to do so. Based on the discussion today at CEIV, it would not surprise me to see this site adopt a similar policy - or, at least, delay publishing the solution until the submission deadline has passed. If the latter turns out to be the case, it would not affect us here in Canada as there is a four month delay before the puzzles are published here.

Seeing as this was a Daily Telegraph Saturday prize puzzle, there was heavy traffic concerning this puzzle on AnswerBank [DT 25822].

Today's Puzzle

It took me a while to get started, but once I had found the solution to one clue, others quickly started to fall into place.

Even though I was quite sure that I had the correct solution [RYAL], for the longest time I was not able to decipher the wordplay for the following clue:

12ac Larry allowed to retain old coin (4)

I was totally hung up on thinking that RYAL was somehow an anagram of LARRY with one of the Rs deleted. Finally, I took one last look at it before heading to the "cheat" sites, and - Voilà! - I suddenly realized that it was a hidden word clue.

12ac {LarRY ALlowed to retain (hidden word indicator)} /\ old coin [RYAL] (4)

This leads me to ponder whether the setter actually conceived the clue with this possibility in mind or whether it is merely a coincidence. After all, the setter could just as easily have used another name such as MARY rather than LARRY. Perhaps the setter was originally planning on using wordplay such as I suggested but couldn't get it to work properly and settled on a hidden word instead. I guess trying to peer inside the brain of the setter makes for interesting speculation.

Finally, I got the answer to 25ac "In respect of intelligence at university first-rate (2,3)" thanks to a tip from xwd_fiend in a comment to a previous post that UP is a British expression meaning "at University".

That's all for today.