Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Thank you very much, ginge. Picture on its way.

Jack- the instruction results in the victim lying horizontally in 39. It should leave all real words.
Also the weapon needs to be chewed up before it is incorporated into the visitors. Its letters go in the unfilled first cells of some down clues leaving real words. One of these is 5 down which results in a real word.

My thanks to ginge and smithsax. Two crucial details missed. Clearly, I am as poor an observer as one of late arriving group!

I struggled to finish this crossword.

It was hard from beginning to end (as it should be), but I felt that there was too much solver knowledge assumed. Essentially all the missing letters had to be discovered in order to get the theme, unless you were already familliar with the work and could make a guess at it. Not having any indicator for the (-1) down clues was pretty mean and, I think, an unnecessary complication, although I can see how a contrary view might be argued. Despite this, one can still marvel at the cleverness of the construction.

Overall, the puzzle was a slog rather than a challenging pleasure. I only persevered because I don't like to be beaten!

I hope there aren't too many like this in the pipeline.

Rant over!

Piffleworthy - my experience of the down clues was a bit different. As we were promised an author at the end I started with the last down clue and worked up so after solving 33 and 35 I was pretty sure of the author. My next solve was 14d and after googling his bibliography I had the work. A quick look at the plot summaries and an obvious story jumped out to fit with the preamble so theme and all the shifted letters identified after solving just 3 clues.
I particularly liked the title considering our current situation. All in all I enjoyed this one.

I must say I did enjoy this one... the theme was easily derived from just a few of the moving letters in the down clues....and it was good fun despite the taxing clues. Happy that I’ve completed it all okay....but just one piece of parsing pls? 2 down. The definition is clear and the moving letter is known. I am missing only the unchecked letter which is obvious anyway ...but the parsing is just eluding me... anyone? Thanks..

Hi Jarsseven,

It's a 4 letter synonym for "road" (with the 'o' moved from 'course') minus P(ower) and following a 1 letter form of "of" (it's in Chambers) - definition is "curse"

Hi jarsseven, c(o)urse => r(o)ad;
o' + (p)ath

Thanks..both Brendan & Ginge. How strange that the
simplest conundrum often takes longest to resolve...even when you know the answer.

That was beautifully constructed but hard work. I particularly like the fact that after the crime has been committed, the victim ends up ‘on the carpet’, both in the source and in the grid (40a).

Just two little queries, since I hate loose ends. 26a, America’s my country. Is that just a reference to the tendency in the US to refer to it in that way as “my L...”? I couldn’t see any marked US references in Chambers. And 3d (Protester who attacked ill lord did time in rough nick). I’m happy with the letter shift and the definition. That means we have ‘Lord did tie in rough nick’ as the wordplay. Lord is the first three letters, tie in rough nick is the last three. What about the middle D? That would suggest to me that it is clues by ‘did’, but I don’t think that’s usually abbreviated by ‘d’.