ACL Grid: 15 minutes or so
Meta: 20 minutes 
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G’day from Downunder! Benchen71 here with another selection from Ariadne’s Crossword Library. This time, we have a guest constructor! The June puzzle, constructed by Hannah Binney, is entitled “Step and Repeat” with the prompt: The meta answer is a 19th century novelist.
I did not notice anything obviously meta-related as I was filling in this larger-sized (18×17) grid, other than the middle entry: 51A {Book for the beach (or an ironic description of the most famous work by this puzzle’s meta answer)} = LIGHT READING. Based on that clue, and a similarity to the form of the puzzle title, perhaps the answer will be LEO TOLSTOY because of the size of his massive novel War and Peace!
Noticings:
- There are plenty of literary characters and quotations from books in the grid/clues.
- 45A PESTS – includes STEP going backwards.
- Repeated letters? In the across direction: RABBI, BEEF, COO, RRR, EELS, NELLY, EMMA, ARRESTS, IGLOO, KEEP, ODDS, STROOPWAFEL. But “BEOR ELM ROE DO” doesn’t spell a very helpful message. And there are no double letters in the bottom quarter, which makes this mechanism unlikely (thinking as a constructor!)
- PACE in SPACEOPERA; STRIDE in GHOSTRIDER; … woo hoo! I think we’re on to “step” one!
The long across entries (otherwise known as the themers) contain something associated with a “step”:
- 20A {Alter ego of motorcycle stuntman Johnny Blaze} = GHOSTRIDER
- 33A {Pretentious students who may be found loudly harmonising at a cast party} = THEATREKIDS – I really appreciated the English spellings in this clue/entry!
- 51A {Book for the beach (or an ironic description of the most famous work by this puzzle’s meta answer)} = LIGHTREADING
- 70A {Dutch treat that fits over a coffee cup} = STROOPWAFEL – these things are delicious!
- 86A {“Dune” or “The Expanse,” for example} = SPACEOPERA – I absolutely loved “The Expanse”, both as a TV series and as a book series; and the Denis Villeneuve “Dune” movies were outstanding.
OK, so that’s the “step” of the puzzle title. Presumably, it’s time for the “repeat”…
Fancy that: those words appear in other clues!
- 10D {Stride pianist Don} = EWELL
- 28D {“Star Trek” captain Jean-___ Picard} = LUC
- 54D {Challenge for tires with low tread} = ICE
- 69D {Troop : monkey :: parliament : ___} = OWL
- 74D {Pianist’s pace} = TEMPO
… which means the meta answer must be GEORGE ELIOT, whose most famous novel, Middlemarch, definitely fits the weightiness referenced in the central clue. And, of course, I now see that the themers essentially have a “middle” word associated with “marching”. The puzzle title ties in, too, since if you step and repeat you are basically marching. Finally, in a nice touch, 83D MARY in the lower right corner, echoes the novelist’s real name: Mary Anne Evans.
Thanks, Ben! 67 correct answers this month and 9 incorrect submissions. Two of those incorrect submissions were for Tolstoy, which I didn’t understand at all until I read your write-up. 83D MARY was a complete coincidence (at least as far as what came up during the editing process – Hannah may have put it there on purpose and I just never noticed), but a fun Easter egg!
A huge thank you to Hannah Binney for being ACL’s first guest constructor and for putting together such an enjoyable puzzle.
Well I got nowhere with this, well actually got to the wrong place. I saw the steps and realized if you repeated them you were doing a March. Let’s see, March associated with a 19th century writer – presumably female – what about the March sisters, all those Little Women Ms. Alcott told us about…oh, and with a readability index about the same as Middlemarch. Then of course the “march” words were among the letters not in the actual “middle” (minor yes, but meta solutions have turned on less)
To be fair to the constructor I did not see the elegance of the “and now appearing in…” which would have given me a fighting chance.
Thankfully it was a 19th century writer because for the longest time all I could get was Anne Rice from grid suggestions: Ayn, Rice, Theatre Kids (both her kids have done theatre), Space Opera (“Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis”), repeated claims that she hired a GHOSTWRITER [GHOSTRIDER] for later books and her own books under a nom de plume), Light Reading (not referring to ANY Anne Rice book, particularly her “Diary of a Vampire”) and several other things I thought were dead giveaways…save for that pesky century thng.
In the end, very nice puzzle even for the less literary of us.