Smudge’s last Listener “The Green Grass Don” (4863) was about the rather wonderful Mad Gardener’s Song. Now we have eponymous Smudge. ¿Qué? as Manuel might have said…
The preamble shows that it is packed with thematic content – but the clues are thankfully ungimmicked, bar two that are wordplay only and establish the title of the thematic work. Back to those in a moment. There are also clashes in ten cells. A hidden five-letter “feature” has to be found in the grid and exposed by blanking surrounding cells. Resolving the clashes with new letters then reveals the name of the creator, a word for the hidden feature, and two other features of the work. That’s a lot!
The clues were mostly gentle with the clashes not getting in the way at this stage. ELCHEE had appeared undefined at 11d – and a bit of searching found LIEGER balancing it also undefined at 14d. Ambassadors… At that point something clicked. It has to be Hans Holbein’s very famous painting The Ambassadors (in the National Gallery with its smudged-out SKULL at the bottom. Not really a smudge of course but an ANAMORPHOSIS (top line of grid) or object that only acquires its proper shape when seen from an acute angle. A GLOBE and a LUTE are among a host of other symbolic objects in the picture – and yes, there they were in the grid, and in their proper places like the ambassadors and the skull. Masterful. And H HOLBEIN appeared in due course on the bottom row as a signature as it were.
This was quality setting – but back to the clues to justify all that speculation! The clashes now needed careful attention and turned out to be:
ADAMOV > ANAMOR, SAGAS > NAGAS, WEEST > REEST,
PTOSIS > PHOSIS, NIGH > HIGH
GLEBE> GLOBE, MORTS>MOOTS
LUCE>LUTE, GUSLAR>T-S-AR
CLUEIN>OLBEIN, NONES>NONEO, HERON>HEROB
ADAMOV was not a dictionary word of course – at 1 across! – but easy to find via Google. PTOSIS was in the dictionary but also a new one for me. HALER was the first that really slowed me down. All the letters were checked, but what was the wordplay? “Healthier” was clear, but back to the dictionary to find that a haler is also 100th of a Czech koruna – so “not much dust (Chambers def 8: gold, money). And HALE is also drag in Chambers, so a HALER is also a “tower” I suppose. (I had to get HAULER out of my mind.) A triple definition! Quality clueing as well, with a nice occasional difficulty to slow the racers down.
STEERAGE which followed it at 18a was another such, with the definition of “government” not too hard to get once a couple of crossers were in place but again the wordplay was tricky. After a lot of head-scratching, it works like this: start with SUFFRAGE for “vote” (Chambers 2) and p
ut in TEE (support) in place UFF (University Fees Falling initially i.e. initial letters). That initial diagnosis of the clues as gentle certainly needed some qualifying, but all in all the grid filled pretty quickly, and given that I had the theme, the endgame followed in close order too. (If only all my solves went so smoothly…
There were some welcome touches of humour with very readable and sometimes topical surfaces of the sort that leave an average setter like me feel rather inadequate, but the “habitual customers” in 24d sound like regulars at the local so here’s to Smudge’s continuing membership of the elite Listener Oenophile Club and perhaps the chance of a pint at the bar sometime to talk about how he pulled it off.
NB Submitted solution needs pale grey cells to be “blanked” and no highlighting is required. And remember that as always a full parsed solution is available at https://www.listenercrossword.com/.