Almasti is a relatively new Listener setter. We saw his first in 2024 on the subject of Morris dancing.With Asti in his name, I don’t have to check that he is a member of the elite Listener oenophiless but he confirms it in his very first clue, ‘White gown covered in Malbec (3)’ (ALB) “Cheers, Almasti!” What a generous start – the first of many generous clues. Then it got even better. The next two clues gave us TURQUOISE and AMBER and, with that helpful title ‘Jet Wheels’ one of the blogging team, as he so often does, before entering a word in the grid, recognised the theme. ‘Jet Wheels’ anagrams (“plays”) to ‘The Jewels’ and THE PLAY OF THE JEWELS appears in Rudyard Kipling’s KIM.
Solving mate Wiki helps: In the novel, the game is used as a training exercise for young spies in Simla by the character Lurgan. A collection of diverse items—including precious stones (jewels), pieces of glass, coins, and trinkets—is placed on a tray and covered. Trainees are allowed to look at the array for one minute, after which it is covered again, and they must write down or list as many of the items as they can remember.
Indeed, I remember playing ‘Kim’s Game’ in the Girl Guides a long time ago.
A look at the novel told us that we needed FOUR EMERALDS, THREE TURQUOISES, TWO SAPPHIRES, TWO RUBIES, a TOPAZ, a CRYSTAL, AMBER and IVORY. Those accounted for 15 clues and it was a kind of entertaining back-solve hunting for them, with the mildly disconcerting word-lengths in the grid – two 12s and a 10 that initially didn’t seem to have clues (of course light dawned later – that’s where we put out FOUR EMERALDS, TWO SAPPHIRES, TWO RUBIES and the TURQUOISES in the plural).
Those jewels with wordplay only, were intriguingly scattered amongst the other clues, sometimes like AMBER, CRYSTAL, TOPAZ, one TURQUOISE, one RUBY and the first EMERALD, in their alphabetical place. but of course, Almasti couldn’t give us three consecutive TURQUOISE clues or four EMERALDS without giving the game away so it was an amusing hunt
I had put K I M in the circles in that order, and struggled to find an eight-letter K word that would fit in the 1 down space. It wasn’t until MIRANDIZED, IZMIR and IMPI started a gridfill, that I realized that IVORY, maybe could go there, intersecting with VALSE and REAN, and the KIM as I K M.
‘In TV series engine at York regularly stops (8, two words)’ – but Ivory what? BAT, CAT, HAT, VAT? We needed RUTINS to intersect with that missing letter to tell us that a RAT had sneaked in and even Mrs Bradford doesn’t have the IVORY RAT. Then looking back at the full text of Kim I saw that the ivory object there was in the form of a …rat! The parsing was tricky but I went for IVOR ( the TV engine) AT being”stopped” by Y(o)R(k) (i.e. regularly taken).
There was a lot of material in the grid. I find that, when that is the case, symmetry often has to disappear (but do solvers really care about that, I wonder, or just setters and some editors?) I am less convinced about abbreviations. Almasti had EOKA, ANS and SRA, Two were tricky. ANS is from “A case of nerves?” – a clever &lit but is the Autonomic Nervous System a case? SRA is from “See secretary periodically train people” and the train people are the Strategic Rail Authority – not an abbrevation many will remember from 2001-6 when it existed. But I suppose all that material justifies those too.
It was certainly an entertaining solve. Thank you Almasti.