Finding the threads – Puzzle Collection 61

When tackling a Stinker, it is easier to get in than to get out – a lot like a LABYRINTH. That ‘Confusing network’ of clues can trap you at any turn, just like Daedalus’ maze which held the Minotaur in Crete.

Young Athenians were sacrificed to the beast and none could escape from the maze until brave Theseus managed to slay the monster. How did he find his way out?

He was given a clew, or magic ball of thread, by the king’s daughter, Ariadne, who had fallen in love with young Theseus. He let out the thread on his way in, and followed it on his way back out (just like Hansel and Gretel followed the scattered pebbles).

It is from this clew that we get the word clue that we puzzle lovers are so familiar with. Like the thread, the clues act as guides to making your way through the baffling grid.

However the clue is only half the story and if you put LABARINTH at 15ac, you were facing a monster of a different kind – the spelling monster!

The Devil’s Dictionary has such entries as OCEAN – a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills, or MISFORTUNE – the kind of fortune that never misses. It was written by American satirist, Ambrose BIERCE (152ac) between 1881 and 1906. First printed in a weekly paper, it was later made into a book with the original title, Cynic’s Word Book. A few of you hadn’t heard of this tongue-in-cheek word lover and various guesses appeared for his name.

Another name caught out some at 200ac. ‘Elizabethan poet, Edmund SPENSER’ and not Spencer, is best remembered for his unfinished epic The Faerie Queen.

Clue 210ac was abominable! No, really; it was ‘Abominable’ and needed the answer EXECRABLE (which sounds like a pretty abominable word!). Where consecrate is to declare sacred, execrate is to declare abhorrent.

EXECRABLE came off the E in CUNIEFORM (‘Sumerian script’) at 187dn and if you had this as CUNEIFORM you were left trying to fit INEQUABLE or INEFFABLE. Like a maze, one wrong turn leads to another, and coming off EXECRABLE was CREED for ‘Doctrine’. INEQUABLE allowed for RULES but this made ‘Lumpy growth’ NOSE and that just would not do! The answer was NODE. Confused? Let’s move on.

At 258ac ‘pedestal’ was PLINTH and not PLYNTH and 271ac ‘Hellish’ was STYGIAN not STIGIAN. Stygian means ‘of the river Styx’, the river in Hades across which the souls of the dead were ferried by Charon.

It was hard to see the threads in the clue 56dn in the Giant Cryptic. Let me unravel it for you. ‘New (a trigger to rearranging letters) website about original (trigger to first letters) Custom House entrances (the straight part of the clue)’. Entrances doesn’t just mean ways in but with a shift of stress means BEWITCHES, an unjumbling of WEBSITE plus CH.

The Monster Colossus didn’t throw up too many loose threads, however 63ac ‘Deliberate lack of cooperation’ was DEFIANCE, like the movie with Daniel Craig, and not DEVIANCE, and 325ac ‘Wood preservative’ was CREOSOTE not CREASOTE.

Have fun following the threads once again.