There are usually one or two points of interest in an Observer barred puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if you would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible, by email.

Gemelo 53

This puzzle is available at https://content-api.slowdownwiseup.co.uk/api/mobile/v1/puzzle-data/e3f1ba29-4ca5-47eb-80d0-fc9235ed57ae/file/puzzle.pdf.

Please give your own G-rating for this Gemelo puzzle by clicking on the relevant star above, with one star representing a very straightforward solve by your own standards (Gentle) and five stars indicating a seriously tough one (Gnarly). Note that hovering over the ‘graph’ icon will show you the full breakdown of votes for the current puzzle.

42 ratings were submitted for Gemelo 52, and the average difficulty came out at 2.1, just a fraction above G51’s 2.0. I thought it was perceptibly harder than the previous two plain puzzles and put it at 2.3, but we were still in broad agreement.

It’s sometimes hard to escape the feeling that Gemelo is under instruction not to make his puzzles too tough. This is no bad thing, but I suspect based on his early puzzles that his natural setting is ‘hard’, which means that on occasion we are presented with a decent helping of pretty tricky clues along with some very straightforward ones; today’s crossword seemed to me a good example of this. Overall, though, this was an accomplished offering, with some clever clues that with just a couple of exceptions stayed on the right side of the line between saying what they meant (albeit sometimes in a rather unnatural way) and giving inaccurate directions to the solver.

Don’t forget to visit the Digest page and tell us in this month’s poll how you like to solve your crosswords – at leisure, against the clock, on your own, or with others. Don’t forget, either, that the Clinic’s own Clue Writing Competition will be starting in December.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 3d, “Piece of fruit (4)”. The wordplay here has a three-letter word for a piece being followed by a shortened form of ‘of’. A few weeks ago I discussed the validity of using, say, ‘into’ in a clue to indicate ‘in’, concluding that since they were shown as two separate headwords in Chambers it was perfectly acceptable, if not particularly desirable. I remember many years ago submitting a puzzle where ‘a’ in a wordplay was intended to yield AN in the answer; the editor rejected it (quite rightly in my view) on the grounds that they were two different forms of the same word. I think that ‘of’ and ‘on’ for O fall into a similar category. It is perfectly reasonable to expect the solver either to transfer the letters OF directly from a clue into the answer or to replace it with a synonym, but not to change it into another form of the same word without any indication to that effect. In my view, something like ‘of shortened’ or ‘on briefly’ is needed to give O. If it were otherwise, ‘has’, ‘is’ and ‘us’ would be valid for S, along with ‘it’ for T, ‘have’ for HA and VE, and ‘not’ for NT.

Across

10a Fuel‘s influence retaining energy on the way back (6)
A four-letter word for a special influence that sways one’s thinking (or for a prejudice) contains a reversal (‘on the way back’) of a two-letter word for energy or ‘pep’.

13a Who can tell what’s essential for cane? This is (5)
The wordplay here has a three-letter word for an informer (‘who can tell’) followed by the central letters of (“what’s essential for”) the word ‘cane’. The clue is a bit of a stretch as an &lit, while the point about the informer is surely not that they can tell but that they do tell, and although ‘essential for’ is necessary for the definition aspect of the clue, ‘essential to’ is what’s needed for the cryptic reading.

14a Precursor to A1 dye? (4)
If A-two is the successor to A1, then this could reasonably be its precursor, but shouldn’t it be A-one rather than A1?

15a Sweet comment about Old Master (8, 2 words)
A reversal (‘about’) of a four-letter word for a comment (in writing) is followed by an obsolete shortened form of ‘Master’. The answer is (4,4) and usually very tasty indeed, although that could not be said of the variant made with broken-up (and rather stale) scones with which I was once faced in a restaurant on the Isle of Wight, seemingly designed to answer the definition ‘a mixture disagreeable to the sight or taste’.

24a Maybe stroke skin of tense young pig (6)
A four-letter word which is synonymous with ‘stroke’ in the context of, say, the game of tennis precedes the first and last letters (‘skin’) of ‘tense’.

29a At first Catwoman did like Batman (5)
This is a charade of the initial letter of ‘Catwoman’ (‘at first’) and a four-letter word meaning ‘did’ in the sense of ‘impersonated’. The use of ‘do’ with this meaning takes me back to the heyday of speciality acts on television and the 1970s series Who Do You Do?, created by LWT following the success of Granada’s The Comedians. Each programme comprised a number of short comedy sketches featuring impressions performed by the likes of Faith Brown, Les Dennis, Peter Goodwright and Freddie Starr (among many other luminaries of the era), with writers including Barry Cryer and Dick Vosburgh. The programme ran for five series and 52 episodes, but I can’t somehow see it being either repeated or revived during the current century.

30a Cracker abruptly made a loud sound (5)
A six-letter word meaning ‘made a loud sound’ is shorn of its last letter (‘abruptly’). This word is the past tense of a verb meaning ‘to peal’, but it could also belong to another verb (with the same spelling) meaning ‘to roar’ – I am pretty sure that Gemelo based his wordplay on the latter, though I can’t be certain.

32a Barely crawl, perhaps bound to either side of hotel yard (9)
A four-letter word for a hop or a bound contains (‘to either side of’) a three-letter word for a hotel and the two-letter abbreviation for ‘yard’. The answer is hyphenated, 6-3, and the definition is oblique but probably not unfair.

Down

2d Temper of airborne goddess (5)
The two-letter abbreviation for ‘airborne’ is followed by the name of ‘the Greek goddess of mischief and of all rash actions and their results’. Her influence is still in evidence today, particularly in the sphere of politics.

4d Upright girl accepting love with speed (8)
A three-letter dialect form of ‘girl’, containing (‘accepting’) the single-letter representation of ‘love’ as Emma Raducanu would know it, precedes a four-letter word meaning ‘with speed’, more familiar as part of a nine-letter word ending -haste (both connected with transport involving fast horses). The definition, although the surface reading might suggest otherwise, is a noun.

5d Name relating to Father used by some in simple Christian observance (12, 2 words)
A four-letter word for a name that is applied to something, a two-letter word meaning ‘relating to’, and a dialect (‘used by some’) word for ‘father’ are all contained by a word meaning ‘simple’, the result being (6,6).

6d Virtually or entirely well behaved (12, 4 words)
A (2,4,2) expression meaning ‘virtually’ or ‘pretty much’ combines neatly with the colour of the heraldic tincture ‘or’. The answer is (2,4,2,4).

7d Who beats four penny-farthings with four rags? (6)
A ‘rag’ is an old slang term for a farthing, and adding four ‘penny-farthings’ and four farthings together yields the value (in old money) of a coin which lingered beyond ‘D Day’ in 1971 but was withdrawn from circulation in 1980; the slang name by which it had been known for over 150 years went with it, and is now shown by OED as ‘historical’, which may be mildly disturbing to those who, like me, remember it all too well.

8d French senior apprentice not needing translator (5)
A seven-letter word for an apprentice is deprived of the two-letter abbreviation for ‘translator’.

22d Nurse holding tube in organ is a life-saver (6)
The two-letter abbreviation for ‘Enrolled Nurse’ contains a four-letter word for a pipe in an organ of the musical kind (and I’m not talking about one of Alfie Boe’s lungs). The answer is a registered trademark which features upper camel case (aka PascalCase).

23d No saving first and last two daggers (5)
The name of the chemical element with the symbol ‘No’ loses (‘saving’) both its first letter and its last two letters.

(definitions are underlined)