The Globe and Mail crosswords: Breaking down the Weekender’s ‘Looking in All Directions,’ cryptic clues and more

Welcome back to another edition of Puzzle Pieces, our weekly look at the Globe and Mail’s Weekender crossword and peek into a selected clue from our Weekender Cryptic crossword. Spoilers ahead!

CAPITAL LETTERS indicate entries in the grid, and [square brackets] indicate clues. Did I mention there are spoilers?

Favourite moments in the Oct. 10 Weekender

Looking in All Directions comes to us from Michèle Govier, who works on international trade matters for the federal government and lives in Ottawa with her husband and two sons. This is Michèle’s second Weekender for us since we launched in February (her first one, Starter Sets, appeared on Mar. 7, and there’s another in the works).

Michèle’s delightful clueing shines throughout this puzzle. At 47A, [Engaged in some seedy activity?] is not about shady deals in the back of an alley, but about “activities with seeds.” It also misdirects the solver by using “engaged,” which can be read as a past-tense verb or as an adjective. In this case it’s the verb meaning we’re leaning on to get the answer: SOWED.

72A’s clue, [It might protrude from an old sock] is not a misdirect or a pun, but it’s an evocative image for TOE that makes me laugh. Sticking to the anatomy theme, BREASTS, seen at 41D, is often clued as “chicken pieces,” but Michèle and I agreed that human body parts are nothing to shy away from, and besides, there was a great opportunity for a fun clue here: [Nursing providers?]

Finally, as a long-time baseball mom, I also felt very seen by the clue/answer pair at 58D, [Question after missing the game]: WHO WON.

Breaking down the theme

When you see a completed crossword puzzle, it can be hard to appreciate the work that went into constructing it. That’s particularly true in a puzzle like this one, where the theme is something you notice after the fact. There are no tricks, missing bits or extra letters to add in. So let’s take a moment to appreciate what’s going on.

This puzzle essentially has four sub-themes, each with its own “revealer”: NORTH BAY (38A), SOUTH PARK (101A), EAST RIVER (46D) and WEST WOOD (48D). Each describes the entries along the corresponding grid edge:

• Bays along the north edge: HUDSON, JAMES and GANDER
• Parks along the south: GLACIER and STANLEY
• Rivers along the east: NELSON, FRASER and BOW
• Woods along the west: SPRUCE, CHERRY and ASH

Michèle made sure that all of these could be clued as other things. For example, NELSON at 21D is clued as [The Simpsons bully with a distinctive laugh], and STANLEY at 129A is clued as [Faddish tumbler brand].

She also wanted to keep the grid as symmetrical as possible from left to right, so the entries down the east and west sides had to match in length. The south edge was further limited: parks like Algonquin or Sasquatch were out, because there aren’t a lot of good Q-ending words for the crossing Down slots. So even before construction began, this was a pretty tight list with quite limited options to choose from.

Constructors can usually play with the placement of their theme entries to find the best “fill” for the grid, but this theme left very little room for that. Each sub-theme was tied to a specific edge, and each corner had two entries basically locked into place. All of the revealer entries also touched entries that touched some of the edge entries (except for SOUTH PARK, which Michèle cleverly isolated with black squares).

I like to say that there’s no point in doing an ambitious theme if the rest of the grid is full of junk. It would only suggest that the goal was unachievable.

But Michèle was committed! Her hard work paid off in a grid that’s filled with real words and lively clues, with very little “glue” or crosswordese. I, for one, am impressed.

A note from constructor Michèle Govier

This was a puzzle where the theme was fun to develop (I enjoyed the opportunity to include references to places and things from different regions of our beautiful country), but where the execution was tricky. I lost count of the iterations! So I am very pleased to finally see it in print. I hope you enjoy solving it!

Cryptic clue of the week

I’ve been writing this column for a while now, and even though there’s a lot to learn in cryptic solving, I’m surprised to find there’s a type of clue I haven’t covered at yet. But here it is.

I’ve selected 9A from our Oct. 10 Weekender Cryptic: [Troupes repeatedly reorganized huge retail outlet (10)].

Right away, I noticed “reorganized.” That seems like a pretty clear anagram indicator. But of what? We need a ten-letter answer. “Huge retail” is ten letters, but if that were the anagram fodder, we’d be left with extra words on either end the clue. “Repeatedly” is also ten letters, but also too small a chunk of the clue to be responsible for all ten letters of the answer.

I wondered if if “reorganized huge” could give us four of the required letters, though I couldn’t think of any useful words start or end with, say, EUGH or GHUE.

Then “repeatedly” caught my eye, and that’s when things clicked into place. “Repeatedly reorganized” can indicate a letter bank. Other letter-bank indicators might be “mixed up again and again,” “with some duplicated components” or “multiple recurring parts of.” The idea is that we’re given a bank of letters and asked to both mix them up and reuse some of them.

In this clue, we’re given “troupes repeatedly reorganized.” If we repeat some of the letters of “troupes” and reorganize them, we get SUPERSTORE, a “huge retail outlet.”

As always, learn more about cryptics from Fraser Simpson’s article How to solve The Globe’s cryptic crossword.