ACL Grid: 10 minutes
Meta: 10 minutes 
[4.00 avg; 1 rating] rate it
G’day from Australia! Goodness me, has another month gone by and it’s time for another selection from Ariadne’s Crossword Library? Yes, indeed! The May puzzle is entitled “In All Directions” and was constructed by Emma Oxford. The meta prompt: The meta answer is a literary location which should appear as a clue in this puzzle but does not. Well, that’s an intriguing prompt, to be sure…
As I’m filling in the grid, I notice some clues with compass points in them. (I also notice that there are some compass-point heavy entries: eg. 25A OWNERS and 42A NEWWAVE, but that becomes less and less significant as I fill in the rest of the grid.) Once the grid is filled, I have also noticed that the compass points map to the respective position of these entries in the grid. It turns out there are 7 such clues with a compass point:
- 16A {Northeast conference?} = EXPO
- 17A {Northwest passage?} = ALLEY
- 44A {West Virginian?} = WOOLF
- 65A {Southwest territory?} = AREA
- 69A {South bend?} = TURN
- 8D {North star?} = VEGA
- 62D {Southeast freeway?} = PIKE
The one direction from an 8=pointed compass rose that’s missing is EAST.
My immediate thought is that the answer is “East of Eden”, the novel by John Steinbeck. But is it as easy as all that? And is there some way to get a lock on the answer? At this point I drew a compass and wrote the 7 entries in their respective locations. While the first letters of these entries initially looked promising – a good mix of vowels and consonants – I couldn’t get them to spell anything useful, other than APT WAVE!
However, it would make better sense if one of the clues in the east part of the grid could, in fact, be clued as “East something?” Checking the entries in this region of the grid, it’s possible that 38D {Reproductive cell} = OVUM could be clued “East egg?” Now, “Easter egg?” would read better, but that violates the pattern by adding extra letters to the direction. Hold on one goldarned minute, isn’t EAST EGG a place in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby? A quick google search confirms that it is. So that’s a lock!
Another fun puzzle from Emma!
4 Stars from me (the puzzle rating system doesn’t list this puzzle name).
Nice puzzle by Ariadne (Emma Oxford) and good sleuthing by Ben Chenoweth (BenChen71 on Muggles website) who is a good mate from Down Under (Melbourne, Australia).
It’s abbreviated as ACL at the top of the list.
Thanks Ben! 74 correct answers this month and 10 incorrect ones. As you might imagine, a high turnout for “East of Eden” among the incorrect responses.