Fifteensquared

Solving time: about 2 hours

This was a nice example of a fairly gentle thematic puzzle. Extra words in clues are a fairly simple way of providing thematic messages, but the idea of using the central letter or pair of letters was a bit of variation from the usual first letter.

I made good progress with solving clues, and fairly soon had a few names of writers emerging - “C DICKENS” probably came first. I was then a bit stuck with about half a dozen clued answers left and the unresolved question of why eight names were linked with nine unclued entries. Looking at the unclued answers, I saw that CARDS, BLEAK, MIRTH and SLEEP all matched book titles with ‘House of ___’ or ‘____ House’, and that M Dobbs, E Wharton were also among the names - I couldn’t remember whether Wharton’s one was Mirth or Sleep. This led on to spotting that two of the nine unclued answers could be POOH CORNER. So the eight books are:

The House of the SPIRITS - I Allende
The House of SLEEP - J Coe
BLEAK House - C Dickens
House of CARDS - M Dobbs
The House on the STRAND - M Du Maurier
The House at POOH CORNER - A A Milne
The Fall of the House of USHER - E A Poe
The House of MIRTH - E Wharton

On then to the bit I sometimes struggle with - finding the phrase in the grid. The enumeration (10,6) made HOUSES easy to guess as the second word, and looking for this in the grid , I first found HOU in YOGHOURT, with SES as you turned west from the O. I then saw PUBLISHING, forming the rest of a house shape, and fairly soon saw the other (slightly different-shaped) house, using the BLIS in BLIST and SHING in SHINGLE. One or two quibbles and questions below.

Nearly forgot the last detail - explaining the title. Something you should always ponder for thematic barred-grid puzzles. In this case, a pun on “Random House”.