Mystery Month (spotlighting great fictional mysteries) continues over in Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up -- and over here in the regular Sunday Puzzle as well, since I'm a bit swamped this month and it's easy to borrow puzzles I'd intended to post there and post them here (with somewhat more devious clues).
I'd hoped to lure some of the folks from Monday Murder Mystery over to our puzzle circle, but -- alas! -- that doesn't seem to be happening yet. Ah, well. MMM is a great series, and mysteries are often great puzzles, so I encourage Sunday Puzzlers to visit them Monday evenings and check them out.
Last week's Sunday Puzzle spotlighted a classic John Dickson Carr puzzler. It also featured a reference to this classic Phil Ochs song:
Tonight's puzzle includes reference to another great song from another great political song writer. I'll post a YouTube for that one after the puzzle is solved.
Also featured in the answers to last week's puzzle was "Red Waters, Crimson Death" -- a Batman by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. During much of the '60s comics had tried to avoid politics and social issues (with the exception of red-baiting, which was standard comics fare at a lot of companies). But in the early 1970s comics began experimenting with 'relevance' -- letting the heroes tackle social issues as well as super-villains. Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams were at the forefront of this, especially with their Green Lantern / Green Arrow stories (starting with this famous issue). "Red Waters, Crimson Death" came out 9 months later, and had Batman encountering an environmental problem, the red tide (blamed here on a greedy capitalist more interested in profit than in the environmental damage he was causing). There are no comparable comic book references in tonight's puzzle, but there are still lots of other political tidbits for you to enjoy.
In addition to a JulieCrostic, there's also a Cryptic Crossword in tonight's diary. Both puzzles are waiting for you below the orange squiggle.
First up, here's tonight's Cryptic Crossword. For anyone unfamiliar with this kind of puzzle, you can find an explanation of how the clues work here (courtesy of The Nation).
CLUES ACROSS:
1. Take the train back to Corsi.
5. Right-wing maniac never has facial problem
6. Taitz looks back to find there's no love left
7. Without me orphan becomes a queen
CLUES DOWN:
1. Note: the 18th state is known as a land of confusion
2. There's no return after 99 becomes an idol...
3. ... and soon there's no return after one.
4. Goscinny is known as being relevant to normal English
And now, here's tonight's JulieCrostic.
If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, the idea is: (1) Figure out the answers to the clues, and (2) fill them into a grid of x rows and y columns (where x and y are numbers you'll need to figure out 'cause I'n not going to tell you). (3) Each answer in a row has all the letters of the previous answer in that row plus one new letter. (4) Write the new letters in the spaces between words and these will for vertical columns which spell out a message (in this case the title of a great mystery novel). (5) The answer-length pattern is the same for all the rows; if the answers in one row have lengths 4-5-6-7-8, then the answers in all the rows will have lengths 4-5-6-7-8.)
My explanation may sound complicated but once you get the hang of it it's really pretty simple. Give it a try! (Or, you can find complete instructions, and examples of what solved puzzles look like, in our companion series Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up.)
But beware. On Friday nights the puzzle gremlins:
(a) bundle all the clues into tidy little groups of 3, regardless of how many answers there actually are to the rows in the puzzle. (If the number doesn't divide evenly by 3 they add blank clues to make all the bundles have the right number of clues.)
(b) remove all the capitalization from the clues.
(c) sometimes fiddle with the punctuation of clues, removing punctuation which should be there and adding punctuation which shouldn't. (They also on occasions have been known to fiddle with word spacing -- so that, for instance, password might appear as pa's sword.)
1. the end is holly
2. sun god, sun god, sun god, sun god, sun god, sun god, sun god, sun god, sun god, sun god!
3. found on the heads of scalia, thomas, kennedy, roberts and alito
4. old hands
5. tina or ted
6. establishment
7. educational lehrer song
8. what, do you mean "we"?
9. goose or betty
10. small talk
11. aardvark
12. kind of behavior David Williams was more worried about than bullying [implying he did not consider bullying to be this]
13. premature this is no fun
14. 1980 bull
15. moving clumsily
16. kind of rights
17. housecleaners
18. drink follower
19. deciduous conifers
20. right proper in england
21. discusses
22. grab
23. punish
24. be witches