This one flowed pretty steadily from the NW corner, where the first few clues allow a pretty generous introduction.  The FT puzzle seems to have suffered an upsurge in bizarro surface readings of late, and today extends that trend. I’m sure that it’s just a coincidental clustering, and after a couple in close succession I tend to become more attuned to subsequent infractions. Still, here’s hoping they don’t become any more endemic.

Across
1 H,AND,I,CAP
6 P(ED,L)AR - Not completely convinced that “Mean”=Par, but happy to let it ride.
12 TAIL,ORMADE (roamed)*
19 LIKE,WISE - an initial deviation towards a weird surface. But we’re only at the eyebrow-raising stage yet.
21 COPYWRITER - double def (presumably).
24 VIN,DAL,OO (lad)rev - Here we go. “French wine brought boy over with two ducks for the meal”.  A dining experience to rival the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, from the sounds of it.  Besides, isn’t vindaloo simply a style of cooking, rather than a meal in itself?
27 SMITH,Y - Relieved to report that I didn’t have any problems on this one. Otherwise it could have been embarrassing!
28 S(EG,MEN)TS - “Street”=Sts

Down
2 A(WAR)D - “Peace in our time” is a good spot by Adamant.
4 CAP,IT,ATE (tea)* - Again, I don’t really fathom the surface here…
6 P(OG)ROM - …or here either.
8 ANECDOTES (Ace doesn’t)*
13 MADE WELCOME (mad emcee low)* - Curiouser and curiouser…
17 S(KIR)TING - …but here’s our gold medallist for strangest surface of the day! “Bypassing police trap, full of blackcurrant drink”.
20 O,RALLY - simple but effective.
23 DE(-s)IST - one of those words I only seem to encounter in crosswords.

Colin’s comment on no. 44 reminds me that there’s some good news.  My appeal for Inquisitor bloggers was successful and we now have a team of four. Colin is one, and another is “hihoba” who’s responsible for tomorrow’s report on no. 45.  I don’t know the blogging name for the fourth person yet, but you should see them all in action over the next three weeks, and I’m sure the new two will soon have details on the Bloggers page.

Solving time: 2-3 hours for the clues…

Time to admit defeat on this one - I can’t see the last step. The instruction provided by the missing letters in clues is “Colour correctly cells containing theme letters”. The theme is to be ‘deduced by observation’ and has one letter obscured by the central black square. Well I’ve stared at the puzzle for quite a while on several occasions and apart from lots of words with H/I/P/C in them - HIPPIC, PITHY, CHIPPY and so on - I can’t see anything, so I await the inevitable comment telling me how easy the theme and last step are.

In explanations below, the word or phrase containing the missing letter is shown first. There are one or two clues I haven’t quite understood.

An easy puzzle to blog and fairly easy to solve as there are only 20 clues in the whole puzzle, with just 8 being across clues - is this a record? I’m sure there’s been a discussion about this before but I can’t remember what the conclusion of it was.

Not for the first time, I did the crossword, checked the site for the blog, then remembered it was my day! Volcanoes the theme here, six of them, all in the acrosses. Good stuff, as ever, from the Monkey-puzzler.

 ACROSS:

1. VESUVI US (l)UVVIES*. I could see the form of this, but didn’t get it till I knew what I was looking for.

9. A RUM LILY. I think of adults only as X, but A is OK per the dictionary.

12. DELTA. Double def, ref 14. One pedantic point, but do streams have deltas, or do they have to be rivers? Probably they do, I’m no geographer.

13. S TROMBO(LI/ne). Lovely wordplay, switching one half of line (NE) for the other (LI) in ‘trombone’. It’s a volcanic island north of Sicily, where the sand is black.

14. COME ON STREAM (MASTER*).

18. DICK SHEP PARD. (SHIP DECK*) Now even as one with a certain amount of past involvement in CND and the like, I find this pretty obscure, but Dick Sheppard was the founder of the Peace Pledge Union. Why he was not a nail blower I have no idea. http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/people/pst_dick.html

21. MOUNT ETNA. (ANTE<). Good clue. Once I’d got the theme, I looked for a four-letter entry for Etna, but found none. Aha!

23. SAINT HELENS (SA IN THE LENS). This looked like an anagram, but wasn’t. St Helen’s is/was a centre of glassmaking (Pilkington’s), hence ’where it was made’.  The volcano is not in Lancashire, of course, but Mt St Helen’s in Washington State.

24. ERE BUS. The fifth volcano.

27. KRAKA TO A. (hom. CRACKER). And the sixth.

DOWN

1. VI ANDS. Adders for ands is nice.

2. SQUAL(or)L.

3. VOL CANOES. The theme word.

4. UNLISTENED TO. (OUTLINES TEND*). A term also unheard of, to me.

8. STERIGMA. A new pne on me, but clear once you’ve got 20.

11. TRA(i)NS PLANTER. Not difficult, since Barnard could only refer to the heart transplant pioneer, but an elegant clue.

15. TURNS BACK (BURN STACK spoonerised).

17. SCHUBERT - I assume, but don’t know why he’s namely Parry. Ah, hang on, SC = namely, so who’s Hubert Parry… another composer, OK - pardon my ignorance.

19. V IBIS T. Someone who plays the vibes.

20. STIG (GITS<), MA(rk).