Not as hard as some Friday puzzles, but containing one or two relatively obscure words and sub-words with a capacity to frustrate. Took me about 20 minutes over a leisurely breakfast. A lot of clues that are reasonably well disguised, but in fact just combine a one-letter abbreviation with another word to make the answer.

ACROSS:

7. CATACOMB. CAT A COMB. Cat=be sick (usage largely restricted to crosswords?); curry=a kind of comb for horses, also called a currycomb according to Chambers. I’d never heard of it, which made this one harder.

10. OMAN. Love=0, Lover=man, as in ‘my man’.

11. SHOPLIFTER. PILFERS HOT*. Stew is the anagram indicator, which the Ximenean line on nounal anagram indicators would deem unsound, but I don’t have a problem with it. Even though ‘pilfers hot’ is not something from which a stew could be made, the crossword grammar seems to me completely clear - ‘pilfers hot stew’, like ‘beef and onion stew’, requires the component parts to be mixed, and makes a lot more sense than ’stewed hot pilfers’ would. And what do crossword compilers do but exploit the flexibility of language to create ambiguity?

14. TEMERITY. TE + MERIT + Y. Lawrence can also be DH, but TE crops up in more words.

15. LESSON. LESS ON. The grammar doesn’t seem quite right here - ‘wearing fewer clothes’ = ‘with less on.

20. AMRITSAR. RITA’S ARM*.

22. DUENNA. DUE + ANN<. A Spanish word not in everyday use, though it pops up in Don Quixote, I seem to remember.

23. MAKE TRACKS. Very nice double meaning, with ‘go’ as the definition.

24. SCOW. C in SOW. Another obscure one, and while cocaine more or less has to be C, ‘plant’ misleads you to expect oak, ash, pea or such.

25. ORACLE. L in O RACE.

26. RESIGNED. RE + SIGNED.

DOWN

1. BALMORAL. BALM + ORAL. Clever clue, deceptively simple. ’Uttered’ suggested a homonym, ’retreat’ hinted at reversal, and ‘in at containment.

2. PAWN. W in PAN. Dutch = wife = w. Old Cockney slang, as in ‘my old dutch’. Chambers suggests possibly from ‘Duchess of Fife. 

3. BORSCH. R in BOSCH. Could be tricky for some palates/palettes. I’ve always seen this east European soup spelt borscht, but this is an alternative.

5. PREFERENCE. P + REFERENCE. Not a common abbreviation, but clear.

8. BLOTTO. B(et) + LOTTO. Quite a lot of these single-letter indicators today.

13. ABSTINENCE. TIN in ABSENCE.

16. OBSERVER. OB + SERVER. OBs are a basic part of TV newsgathering/ production, but I wonder how current the abbreviation is in the wider world.

18. HAND OVER. D in HANOVER. Again, the royal reference is specific, not just an indicator for king or regal.

19. BRACER. RACE in BR.

22. DESIST. S in DEIST.  A nice way to split the word.

I thought this was going to be reasonably straightforward until I hit stormy weather in the SW corner (points covered in notes below).   

Solving time  34 mins  (slower than usual for me for Quixote)

ACROSS

4  CHESSMAN    Pleasing cryptic definition misleadingly suggesting a boardroom

11  outdrinkING OThers   Hidden, playing on the meanings of bar.

14  D = daughter  What it must be to get lady, it must be IN LAY.    Tricky, and satisfying to work out.

18 DE FERMENT   (SW problem No. 1).    Distracted for far too long by ”deterrent” by the definition “putting off”

20  PASTA   Liked this - the lexicographers (well-represented among setters, I’d say) are “off to a good start” because they’ve got past A in their work!

25  ROW in PL (abbrevation for place).    A bit slow to get this - would have thought not all prowlers are lecherous, but that’s nit-picking, I guess.

27  READ in THEY

28 T(he)Y (heartlessly) RANT (vociferate)

DOWN

1  OS + CAR (WILD) E      OS  outsize = huge  is a crossword staple.

3  C (cold) + RUM (drink) in SPY (importing) so you get ”another” drink

8  ETON upwards in a down clue.    Well-known crossword college.

9  D (Democrat) for R in Relegate (put down, head rolling).    Definition is “representative”

13  ASS + MEN in HART

15  LEFT ALONE   SW problem No 2 and the biggest.    I spent too long looking for a port that might have Co (Company) in it somewhere.     The definition is the cunningly concealed “untroubled by company”.   So Port is LEFT, individual is ONE and they drink A L a litre.      Re the surface reading, that’s a lot of port for one person!

17  GO (try) + TA (army) + HEAD (leader)

22 F A RAD (radiator)

24 (SW problem No. 3)  ”White ball in cricket?  Not right!”     It had to be SPOT from the crossing letters but why?     I’d to go to my third dictionary (Collins) to find out that SPOT can mean the SPOT BALL in billiards.   So my misspent youth was not at that game.    Also was slow to see R being removed from SPORT.    I was expecting something like “cricket, say” as just one example of a sport.

Another one of “those” grids from Nimrod, with only 9 (count ‘em) across clues and 5 of those have 15 letters. It’s been said before, here and elsewhere, that the problem with this is that if you can’t get the long ones, the rest of the grid is hard to crack and when you do, everything else falls in to place very quickly. That said, I don’t think this was as tough as a typical Nimrod; either that or I was on fire this morning as I did this in the time it takes a Central line train to go from Ealing Broadway to St Paul’s (about 30 mins), which is roughly half the time a Nimrod usually takes me.

This is a sample review to show what you can expect in the New Year, when we hope to cover this puzzle every week. Jude is Mike Laws, editor of this puzzle.

On the same day as an Araucaria Alphabetical Jigsaw, this was a similar challenge, with a theme - Pythagoras’ Theorem. Altogether now: “the square on the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares on the other two sides”. Looking back with hindsight, the theme should have been easy to identify - the standard example of a right-angled triangle is the one with sides 3, 4 and 5 units long. The 3, 4, and 5-unit squares are in the grid, with the letters of the 3 and 4 making up the 5. We also have non-standard symmetry - reflective symmetry about the NW-SE diagonal which divides the grid into … two right-angled triangles.

But somehow this all passed me by, or I just got stuck into solving as many clues as possible. Doing it this way, the big step is to get one or both of the nine-letter answers, and then the seven letter ones that intersect them. The clues were easy enough for me to solve at least a third of them “cold”, which gave me enough to start pencilling things in and then working backwards from checked letters to get the rest. I never used the possible desperate step of identifying possible unclued lights by counting the entries of each length in the grid and then comparing this to the counts from clues, to get 5, 4, 5, 4, 5, 4, 4, 1. I eventually had enough letters in the three squares to start identifying letters that had to be in square C, or in A or B. This gave me the THREE/FOUR/FIVE unclued answers, and then the other unclued lights fell easily - the TROPHY/SAGA and ARGOSY/PATH anags of Pythagoras, and the cheeky I = 1 that “completes the grid”.

I didn’t time myself but would guess at about 90 minutes. Clues are given arbitrary numbers below - their positions in the sequences of Across and Down clues.  There were plenty of clues here that you could solve without needing to look at Chambers, which I count as a good thing.  So this time, the clue analysis is pretty brief.