11 EMERALDS/P HEASANT Greens and last of the medlars cooked/ for rustic pageants - no good, sadly (8 8) 10 LINE AR/TWINGE Queen’s make-up/ showing a pinch of colour - a bit of white included (6 6)ĭouble definition (e.g. 8 BASEMAN/BO UNDED US sports player, one from HQ,/ linked with forward daughter under the sheets (7 7)Ĭryptic definition/ON D(aughter) in BED. The word was familiar to me from the CS Forester Hornblower novel. ![]() Atropos was the Fate that cut the thread of life. Took me a long time to parse it/A T(utor) *POOR S(tart). Many thanks to PeeDee for his help in constructing the blog.ħ EX CITED/ATROPOS Was heartless, left/ a leading tutor with terribly poor student to start with - that’s fate (7 7)ĮXI(s)TED. Definitions are underlined and * indicates an anagram. The additional letters are shown in red in the blog but in the diagram I have also used green where the addition occurs in a down clue and I have indicated the probable division between the clues with /. If you finished this one, then you should certainly consider tackling a Genius puzzle. I certainly completed the Genius puzzle in much less time than I needed for this one. In some ways this puzzle was similar to the December Genius puzzle by Picaroon (they even share an answer – I can’t say which one, as the deadline for the Genius isn’t until Saturday) but Picaroon’s puzzle also involved adding letters (although only to the across clues) which, in order, made a quotation. I had a few issues with some of the wordplay, but respect is due to the compiler for setting such a complex and satisfying puzzle. ![]() Maskarade has obviously paid particular attention to the surfaces of the clues so that they read very smoothly, concealing the join, although at a cost of some unnecessary linking words. As I commented last year, Maskarade’s style is concise, not to say terse, something illustrated by clues such as 7 across and 17 down (both in the left hand grid). To make matters more difficult, a different letter of the alphabet had to be added to one of each pair of solutions, making a new word which was not clued or defined. There were two identical grids, and the two sets of clues were run into each other with no indication of the join. ![]() This was a challenging puzzle, to put it mildly. For the second year running it has fallen to me to blog the Christmas special by Maskarade, who now occupies Araucaria’s place as the compiler of the holiday special puzzle.
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