Q1
If you sent Brucie, along with the authors of Esio Trot, The Virginian and The Crossing of Antarctica, to Iowa, they would all end up in someone’s garden. How is this?
CLUES
- Esio Trot is a children’s book, far from the best known work of its creator.
- Knowing the common abbreviation for Iowa will help you.
Q2
Why might you find yourself chasing a 1930s Wimbledon star, an associate of Bob Marley, a fellow inmate of Fletch and a test cricketer from Tyneside out of your vegetable patch?
CLUES
- This is to do with their nicknames.
- The Wimbledon star is British – but is not Fred Perry.
A1
‘Sending someone to’ Iowa in this context entails adding the common US postal abbreviation IA to the three names clued in the question. It produces four familiar plants.
The late Sir Bruce Forsyth (1928–2017) thus gives us forsythia, a plant closely connected to one of his ancestors, the eighteenth-century botanist and founder member of the Royal Horticultural Society William Forsyth, in whose honour the shrub forsythia was named.
Roald Dahl (1916–90) wrote Esio Trot, a sweet tale in which a lonely man wins the heart of his neighbour by convincing her that he can make her pet tortoise double in size, using the magic words ‘Esio trot’ (which is ‘tortoise’ backwards). Adding –ia to Dahl’s surname gives us a dahlia.
The Virginian (1902) was the best-remembered fictional work of Owen Wister (1860–1938), and gave rise to various film and TV versions. James Drury played the title character in the TV Western which ran to nine series, 1962–71. Adding –ia to Wister gives us wisteria.
Finally, the explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs (1908–99), together with Sir Edmund Hillary, described in his 1958 book The Crossing of Antarctica their successful attempt earlier that year to drive from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, a journey of 2,158 miles lasting 99 days. The same procedure with his name gives us a fuchsia. (All of these plants having, of course, actually been named after other people bearing those surnames.)
A2
You’d chase them out of your vegetable patch because they are all nicknamed Bunny.
They are: Edward ‘Bunny’ Austin (1906–2000), British tennis star, five-times singles finalist at Wimbledon, runner-up in 1932 and 1938; reggae musician Bunny Wailer (Neville Livingston, b.1947), original member of the Wailers alongside Bob Marley and Peter Tosh; ‘Bunny’ Warren, the affably dense inmate of Slade Prison played by Sam Kelly in the classic BBC TV soap Porridge in 1973–7; Graham ‘Bunny’ Onions (b.1982), Gateshead-born England test cricketer.
Q3
Which mythical giant might cast an envious eye at Zaphod Beeblebrox, Steve Martin, and Desdemona and Othello – and why?
CLUES
- Desdemona and Othello are relevant to this question as a pair, rather than as individuals.
- An envious eye, in the singular, is significant.
Q4
To get to the Crab nebula, set controls for Leeds. To reach the Trifid nebula, head for the Channel Tunnel. For the Orion nebula, meanwhile, you’d skirt Birmingham to the south and east. Can you explain why?
CLUES
- Think of other ways in which these nebulae might be described or classified.
- Your satnav can’t find places that are not on the Earth’s surface so you may have to tap in the next best thing.
A3
The Cyclops, Polyphemus – because he had only one eye, where people normally have two – and the others have two of something that you only normally have one of.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, the alien character in Douglas Adams’s Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series (and novels, TV series and film), has two heads.
Steve Martin, in one of his funniest films plays The Man with Two Brains (1983, dir. Carl Reiner). Brain surgeon Dr Hfuhruhurr, frustrated by his sexless marriage to Kathleen Turner, falls in love with the preserved brain of a dead woman (voiced by Sissy Spacek). Desperate to consummate his love, he attempts to find a brainless body in which to transplant the beloved brain.
Iago, in the opening scene of Othello, rouses Desdemona’s father Brabanzio from his bed to tell him: ‘I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs’. (It’s the best-known literary occurrence of the phrase, but it wasn’t original to Shakespeare – it had been used by Rabelais 70 years earlier.)
A4
The question refers to the Messier numbers of these astronomical objects, according to the classification of nebulae, galaxies and star clusters devised by the French astronomer Charles Messier, the first version of which was published in 1774.
The Crab nebula is classified M1, and thus shares its designation with the motorway going from London to Leeds.
The Trifid nebula is M20 – as is the motorway leading to Folkestone and the Channel Tunnel terminal.
The Orion nebula is classified M42 – like the motorway that skirts the Birmingham conurbation to the south and east.
Q5
What might you make by mixing up: a former model and runner-up Miss USA who won an Oscar as a woman involved in an inter-racial relationship; a raw Swedish-born singer once dubbed ‘The Black Madonna’; a film character who cares for his obese mother and autistic brother; and the Sicilian boss of an American crime family?
CLUES
- Getting any one of the ingredients of this question should give you the theme.
- The crime family is a real one – so it’s not the Sopranos or the Corleones, for example.
Q6
What would a nocturnal hotel employee, an emoticon, the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat and someone seeking shelter in winter all be doing together in the Square?
CLUES
- These elements all belong to the same shadowy world.
- Thinking of the phrase ‘the Square’ in a foreign language might be helpful.
A5
A fruit salad.
They are: Halle Berry (b.1966), runner-up Miss USA 1986, winner of the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Monster’s Ball (2001) in which she played Leticia Musgrove; Neneh Cherry, born Neneh Mariann Karlsson in Stockholm in 1964, whose debut album Raw Like Sushi was a bestseller in 1989; Gilbert Grape – in the 1993 film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? starring Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio; and Joe Bananas (Joseph Bonanno, 1905–2002), American crime boss. Born in Sicily, he came to the United States illegally in 1924, settled in Brooklyn, and soon became a bootlegger and mob enforcer. In 1931 he founded the Bonanno crime family, one of five families that dominated organized crime in New York City. Bonanno’s crime family, which he ruled until the mid-1960s, eventually extended from Brooklyn to Arizona, California and Canada and controlled such illegal enterprises as gambling, loan-sharking and drug trafficking.
A6
These are all clues to titles or elements associated with John le Carré (‘the Square’), real name David Cornwell (b.1931).
The nocturnal hotel employee is The Night Manager, as in le Carré’s 1993 novel televised in 2016.
An emoticon would be a Smiley – the name of the protagonist in le Carré’s classic sequence of novels including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979).
The little gentleman in black velvet is a mole – the reference being to the mole whose hole supposedly caused the Protestant King William III’s horse Sorrel to fall and throw him off, in 1702. The king died of pneumonia arising from the fall, and Jacobites subsequently toasted ‘the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat’ who put an end to the rule of the House of Orange.
The seeker of shelter is a reference to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).
Q7
Why might you look for the lead singer of the Drifters in Glasgow, Detective Mary Beth Lacey in Newcastle and a Belgian international footballer in Carlisle?
CLUES
- Think of the geographical factors that are favourable for the location and growth of a city.
- If you can remember who played Detective Lacey, you’re well on your way.
Q8
What have a cricket commentator, an architect, a French cypher, a Yorkshire power station and a point blank refusal done to upset an American ornithologist?
CLUES
- The ornithologist gave his name to someone else rather better known.
- New people emerge to upset him every few years, and there’s no sign of an end to it yet.
A7
These people all have the names of rivers in northern Britain.
The original singer with the Drifters, in the mid-1950s, was the pioneering soul singer Clyde McPhatter (1932–72). After McPhatter left to pursue a solo career, the Drifters had one of the most notoriously fluid line-ups of any band, recording and touring for decades with an ever-shifting team of musicians. Glasgow, of course, is on the River Clyde.
Detective Mary Beth Lacey in the TV drama Cagney & Lacey was played by Tyne Daly (b.1946). Newcastle stands on the River Tyne.
The Belgian international midfielder is Eden Hazard – who joined Chelsea from Lille in 2012 and moved to Real Madrid in 2019. The River Eden runs through Carlisle.
A8
They are all adversaries of James Bond in the Ian Fleming novels and film adaptations. The name of Fleming’s spy was allegedly inspired by the author of Birds of the West Indies, which Fleming had on his shelf at home in Jamaica.
The cricket commentator is Henry Blofeld, whose father was at Eton with Ian Fleming and whose surname Fleming took for the name of his arch villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, first introduced in the novel Thunderball in 1961.
The Hungarian-born modernist architect Ernő Goldfinger’s name was borrowed for the villain Auric Goldfinger in, er, Goldfinger.
The French cypher is Le Chiffre, the sinister villain in Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale – later played on screen by Peter Lorre (in the 1954 American TV version), Orson Welles (in the 1967 spoof) and Mads Mikkelsen (2006).
The Yorkshire power station is Drax, as in Sir Hugo Drax, the villain of Moonraker.
A flat refusal is no – as in Dr Julius No in Dr No.
Q9
Can you turn DeForest Kelley into the creator of Harry Hole, by way of some Welsh soap?
CLUES
- ‘Some Welsh soap’ is not a cutesy way of referring to a TV series.
- Once you’ve got one of the three, it just requires a bit of shuffling.
Q10
Why would a wild dog, a game of numbers, a hillock in permafrost, a foreign language and a drummer form a sequence – and in which order should they come?
CLUES
- Eyes down for this one.
- The sequence is purely about the words, and nothing to do with size or chronology.
A9
These are three anagrams, give or take a diacritical mark.
Bones – as in Dr Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy, played by DeForest Kelley (1920–99) in the original Star Trek series in 1966–9 and in the first six Star Trek films.
Nesbo – as in Jo Nesbø (b.1960), Norwegian novelist and musician, whose series about detective Harry Hole has sold millions around the world since his novels began being published in English in 2006. Titles (in English translation) include The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil’s Star, The Redeemer, The Snowman and The Leopard. He has also written successful children’s books including Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder (2007) and is the frontman of the Norwegian rock band Di Derre.
Both of these are anagrams of sebon, which is Welsh for soap.
A10
They are (in the order of the question) dingo, bingo, pingo, lingo and Ringo. You just have to sort them into alphabetical order.
A dingo (Canis lupus dingo) is a wild dog found mainly in Australia.
The game of numbers is bingo.
A pingo, also known as a hydrolaccolith, is a small hill found in Arctic and sub-Arctic landscapes such as Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada, Spitsbergen and Greenland. A pingo is formed by ground ice lifting the layer of earth on top of it into a mound which can be over a hundred feet in height. The Kadleroshilik Pingo in Alaska is the highest-known pingo in the world, rising 178 feet from the surrounding lake plain.
A foreign language is colloquially known as the local lingo.
The drummer is, needless to say, Ringo Starr (real name Richard Starkey, b.1940).