Ariadne’s Crossword Library, January 2025

 

G’day, it’s benchen71 here, blogging the first of what I hope will be a long series of monthly crosswords constructed/edited by Emma Oxford, also known in crossword circles as damefox. Emma launched Araidne’s Crossword Library partly to redress the gender imbalance in the contest/meta crossword space. I quote from her FAQ:

If you are a longtime solver of contest crosswords, you will perhaps have noticed that this space is dominated by men. Crossword construction in general is a pretty male-dominated field, but the gender gap gets even wider when you enter the contest crossword niche. ACL is not going to solve this gender gap, but at the very least there will no longer be a month that goes by where solvers can’t find a contest crossword written by a woman.

And by me blogging her crosswords there will be at least one write-up of such a contest crossword here on Fiend each month as well! 🙂

OK, so let’s get to the January puzzle entitled “The One That Got Away”, which is indeed constructed by Emma Oxford and comes with the meta prompt: the popular novel whose title is suggested by the answers to the starred clues. I only noticed this afterwards, but we have a 15×14 grid here, presumably to allow for an even-numbered central entry.

There are 5 starred clues:

• 16A {*Denver-based hockey team} COLORDAOLANCHE
• 21A {*Purchase from Katz’s} DENDWICH
• 36A {*Towards undesirable or unproductive outcomes} UPABLLEY
• 51A {*”A storm is brewing…”} TROUBEAD
• 56A {*Tagline for a classic sci-fi show} THETISOUTTHERE

I think you can see why the grid took me so long: those entries are missing some letters, and the solver must rely on the downs to locate where those gaps are. This is what the entries should have been:

• COLORADOAVALANCHE
• DELISANDWICH
• UPABLINDALLEY
• TROUBLEAHEAD
• THETRUTHISOUTTHERE

[I had a lot of trouble with the second one. As an Aussie, I had no idea what could be purchased from Katz’s, so I did some googling and came up with DENVERSANDWICH, but that gave me either NVERSA or VERSAN as the missing letters. A friend on xword-muggles set me straight.]

So what popular novel is suggested by these five entries? At first I wondered if there was a novel involving five characters with those names. But my googling proved fruitless. So I stepped back a bit, thought about the puzzle title again, and realised that the specific names weren’t important, just that they are all female names and that they are all missing. So the answer has to be GONE GIRL, the 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn, which was made into a movie starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck.

Monthly contest crosswords, like MMMM, usually start out easier and get harder as the year progresses. Emma has bucked this trend somewhat by requiring solvers to deduce the answer, rather than spelling it out in the grid. But it is a great start to what should prove to be a fun crossword contest series. And I hope my name will be the lucky one drawn from the list of successful solvers! (US winners will be sent a book related to the meta solution with the title page embossed “FROM THE LIBRARY OF ARIADNE”. Non-US winners like me will be sent a thematically apt and embossed postcard instead. You can sign up to the ACL mailing list at the bottom of this page.)