I finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “News Quiz”, on Saturday evening, but I only just now noticed, as I was preparing my entry to send in, that there is a little extra surprise concealed in the finished grid. The instructions tell us to highlight one “thematically located” cell in each column to produce the answer to a question; they don’t mention that another twelve letters in the grid spell out something more, also appropriate to the theme. Sweet!

A fairly easy and straightforward puzzle as Listener crosswords go, with a lot of clever clues and some nice discoveries to make at the end when the last pieces fall into place.

Just finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “Contractions”, lying in bed on Sunday morning. A clean, simple, straightforward theme, yet surprisingly difficult — I saw what the idea was within ten minutes of starting it on Friday, after solving just six clues, but the grid filled in only slowly. I worked on it intermittently on Saturday in between other things, completing a little more each time, and the last part, the upper right corner, didn’t fall till this morning.

Lots of good, elegant, but tricky clues, and quite a few that had me metaphorically slapping my forehead once I’d solved them, wondering how I’d failed to figure them out for long (in a few cases even after I’d figured out what the answer had to be from the crossing letters): 18A, 28A, 38A, 4D, 7D, 25D, 26D, and 34D, for example. No jaw-dropping surprises along the way, just a really well-crafted and well-executed puzzle. Very enjoyable.

I finished this Friday’s Listener crossword, “Not a Black and White Decision”, Sunday afternoon. I’d actually finished solving all the clues the day before, but then it took me a while to see what to do with the answers.

The introduction could have been more helpful. The introduction makes it sound like there’s only one way to arrange the answers in the grid in accordance with the instructions, and then, as a bonus, you can find some appropriate words hidden in the completed grid. In fact, there is more than one way, and finding the hidden words isn’t a bonus, it’s the only thing that makes one grid correct and the others wrong. I spent more time than I liked going over the instructions again and again and backtracking over my work looking for what I was missing.

Finally, you’re supposed to resolve one last ambiguity in the grid in accordance with the words that have appeared in the grid; I thought the connection was a bit less than clear-cut, myself, but then I’m actually very familiar with the words appearing in the grid, as they’ve come up several times in the books I’ve edited, whereas I think the constructor probably knows them just from their definitions in Chambers. There’s no particularly compelling reason in the real world why the correspondence couldn’t be the other way round. And there’s actually a stronger connection with something else in the grid, a connection that can be used to resolve this final ambiguity, but the instructions don’t mention it at all.

Oh well. Not a bad puzzle, but the vague instructions added a level of bewilderment that was more annoying than entertaining.

After three very devious Listener puzzles in a row, this week’s – “Past and Present” by Emkay ; seems relatively straightforward. At least, after fifteen minutes’ work I’ve made a good start on the top portion of the puzzle, including solving two of the theme words, and nothing inexplicable has caught my attention yet.

Later: I started the puzzle during my lunch break on Friday, and finished it during my long commute home, finding the two-word phrase that finishes the puzzle just as the BART train was pulling in to the West Oakland station. No big surprises, just a nice straightforward puzzle.

So now what am I supposed to do with my weekend? I may be forced to actually spend some time writing.

I have solved all the clues for this week’s Listener puzzle, “European Revolution” by Spud, and I’ve filled the grid. (I don’t completely understand the wordplay portions of 1 Down and 6 Down, and 25 Across seems to lead to two possible interpretations, but it seems clear what the grid entries have to be in all three cases.)

I’ve found the messages from the across and down clues, but have no idea how to use them. I’ve got the letters from the scrambled clues, other than being unable to resolve that ambiguity about 25A, but don’t know how to interpret them. I’ve Googled the message in the acrosses and learned something new, but not sure how or even whether to apply the subject to the puzzle.

Yikes! Now what?

Later: Yow, I have it at last. The ending is very hard but also very ingenious and funny once you find it.

Turns out I didn’t have the right word formed by the down clues, and didn’t have all the letters from the scrambled clues. Then I stumbled on a near anagram of the letters from the scrambled clues that made a certain sense with what I’d figured out about the puzzle, only it added one letter to the set I had and changed another. Then I saw that there was a third and better reading of 25A that changed that letter into one of the two I needed, and that the other letter I needed was right there to be gotten from one of the other clues but I had overlooked it. So I clearly had the right anagram.

Then I figured out how 1D and 6D worked, and corrected my interpretations of a couple of the other down clues, and the new letters I derived from those gave me a longer word out of the down clues, one that was more obviously (duh!) connected with the grid.

At that point I had two of the six elements I needed to find in the grid. It took me a while to find the other four. It’s very tricky. The introduction says 19 letters in the grid have to be changed. I kept seeing ways that I could create another element by making a small change, but there was no pattern to the changes, no justification for making them — and then all of a sudden the lightbulb went on and I saw the pattern. Sweet!

This week’s Listener crossword puzzle, “A Change of Clothing” by Elgin, is brilliant, and has a hilarious surprise ending. I wish I could talk all about it here without giving anything away, but I can’t. Let’s just say that the puzzle concerns (according to the introduction) a heist, and that there are some red herrings very ingeniously built into the puzzle, and leave it at that.

Oh, and a lot of very nice clues, too.

Even after figuring out what was going on and completing the grid in a way that satisfied all the instructions, gave me the pair of crime fighters I needed, unambiguously pointed at the culprit, and justified the title of the puzzle, I was hung up for a long while because for all this to work out, a particular four-letter combination in my final grid had to be either a word in Chambers Dictionary or a proper noun that could be found in either the Oxford Dictionary of English or Chambers Biographical Dictionary. But it didn’t seem to be in Chambers and I don’t own either of the other two reference books so can’t check in them. However, if it were somebody well known enough to make it into two reference books, he or she couldn’t be hard to track down, right? I did a Google search on the letter combination, and checked Wikipedia, and looked it up in the biographical dictionaries and other reference books that I do own, and there was nothing anywhere.

Well, it turns out that the four-letter word is in Chambers, but for some reason it’s not in the iPhone version that is what I use most often. When I pulled the actual book down from the shelf, duh, there it was. It was a variant spelling of an obsolete word, but still, there it was. That’ll teach me to rely on the completeness of the iPhone version.

Later: Double duh: Chambers Biographical Dictionary is available for searching online.

I just now finished today’s Listener crossword, “Merchandise” by Adam. After filling in the grid correctly, you still have to find a quotation that is “embedded in a regular way” in the grid. I spent a while staring at the completed grid and trying out different ideas — looking for words forward, backward, and diagonally in word-search style, trying every second or third or fourth letter, trying out zigzag paths and knight’s tours and so on — before I finally found the quotation, but I have it now. It’s a very familiar quotation to me — the first words in it I spotted were the third through fifth, and as soon as I found half of the sixth word, the whole line sprang into my head.

1 Down and 16 Across are two more examples of a kind of clue I dislike, where the wordplay makes use of an obvious form of the very same word, like (this is a made-up example) clueing BELOVED as “Cherished one showing passion in bed” (that is, BELOVED composed of LOVE inside BED). 22 Across is of this sort, too, though not quite as blatantly.

You see this kind of clue a lot in British cryptics, but rarely in American ones. Is it a cultural thing? Does this sort of thing just not register to the British puzzle-solving sensibility as being lame?

Still, the puzzle has a number of nice clues, and it was a pleasant challenge. And I’m too busy with working on the play this weekend to be knocking my head against the Listener puzzle all day today, so I’m just as happy to have a moderately easy one this week.

Later: This posting has become the most popular one on this blog in a long time! It seems that a lot of solvers are not having any success in finding the quotation and are searching the Internet for help. I don’t like to give things away, so I’ll just say that the phrase “in a regular way” in the introduction to the puzzle is straightforward and accurate.

I’ve read some snarking online to the effect that the manner in which the quotation is hidden should have been indicated by the theme itself rather than by a phrase in the introduction. I’m not sure I see why; it’s certainly fun when it works out that way, but it doesn’t seem to me to be an unwelcome change of pace to have a puzzle that ends with something of a treasure hunt like this one does.

This week’s Listener puzzle, “Annual Turnover”, was a little easier than average in difficulty, and a good thing for me, too, as I had a lot of rewriting of the play to do this weekend. The 13-letter theme word at 28 Across is a familiar one to me, as I’ve seen it used in word puzzles a number of times, and I got it from only three or four crossing letters; that helped a lot in finishing the puzzle. I also guessed at what the pattern of clashing letters was after I had only three or four of them, and I feel fairly sure I’ve seen in an American crossword somewhere or other the same device of replacing the letters in certain squares with the same symbol used here, resulting (if my memory is right) in the very same pattern. Maybe in a crossword in Games magazine?

As I copied the answers onto a fresh printout of the grid, I noticed that the setter could have removed several of the bars to make some of the words longer and give more crossings. Now, Ximenes developed the practice of giving every word in a bar-style cryptic crossword at least one unchecked letter (that is, a letter used only in one direction and not crossed by a word in the other direction), so that none of the answers would completely fall into place without the solver having to solve the clue. But he intended that for plain bar-style cryptics, and I don’t think it applies so well to a novelty cryptic like this one, especially where the puzzle’s gimmick interferes quite badly with the usual help you expect to get from crossing letters. Giving a few additional crossings where you can seems just sporting to me, and anyway the longer words are usually more interesting for the solver to find. Besides, there are already entries in the grid here with all their letters checked — 3 Down, 20 Across, and so on. So, unless I’m missing something, I think the setter would have done better to give the extra help and give more crossings where he or she could.

To wit: If the three-letter entries at 15A and 47A were extended to four letters, symmetry would be preserved and both would still be valid entries (that is, either words or phrases found in Chambers). Similarly, if you erased a couple of bars to extend the symmetrical pair of five-letter entries at 1D and 42D to six letters each, one of these would still be a valid entry, and the other could easily be changed to any of several possible entries because of the multiple possibilities for its second, third, fourth, and fifth letters. (Another plus: Several of the possible entries would have been more interesting than the one actually used.) Again, if 14D and 34D were extended by one square (toward the edges of the grid), one of the longer entries that resulted would already be valid, and the other could be turned into a valid entry just by changing one of its unchecked letters. Finally, running down the middle column, above and below 19D, are two perfectly good potential three-letter entries that are instead divided by bars into individual unchecked letters.

Still, all in all a pleasant puzzle, not terribly remarkable or surprising or difficult, but fun to solve.

And for a numerical puzzle, too. I solved this even more quickly than the puzzle of two weeks ago: during my lunch break, in well under half an hour!

Unless I’m really missing something, there isn’t anything hard about the puzzle at all. The entries in the grid are all two- or three-digit primes whose digits are all odd. It doesn’t take all that long to list them all (there are 54), make sublists of the ones that match the given categories (two-digit twin primes: 11 & 13, 17 & 19, and 71 & 73; three-digit palindromes: 131, 151, 191, 313, 353, 757, 797, 919; and so on), and then try out the not-very-many possible combinations until you find the ones that fit together in the right places in the grid. I was never stuck for what to do next at any point; I was limited more by how fast I could write than how fast I could make deductions.

There is one neat touch: The grid, a 9 × 9 square, turns out to have exactly 54 entries, which means it uses each number exactly once. It’s a nice piece of construction to pack exactly that set of numbers into a perfect square, and have the resulting grid be symmetrical at that. But the clues give way more information than is needed to figure out how to fill the grid.

The Listener crossword this week makes up for the unusually easy one last week; this one, “Table-Turning”, has been much more of a struggle. However, the final solution is a stunner. I still have three or four clues to solve but it shouldn’t be long now, now that I’ve figured out how to apply the instruction derived from the various letters from the clues and I have the rest of the grid in its final form.