Solution to As Time Goes By

Firstly, hi to Sally, Mark, Tilly & Duffy! Secondly, if you came to this puzzle via my tweet…
https://twitter.com/TheVoidTLMB/status/1338521408394178567
…and spotted the two Casablanca references, sorry, that was a red herring. No Bogart theme here, but there is a different one to be found. The solution, with highlit theme entries, is in this image. The purple letters are merely me showing off – I’m sure you can work out why. More on the theme after this video which explains the clues:


If any of you noticed that I changed 10a on the day after I posted the puzzle, yes, sorry. I noticed, a bit late, that I’d repeated myself in two of the clues, so I thought I’d fix one. Also, 19a should have had one of its letters capitalised. Another thing I noticed late is that the grid didn’t “flow” that well – only 2 answers connect the top and bottom halves, and you can only get into the NW & SE corners via a single clue each. Ah well, not the worst crime, and such things can happen when you’re trying to squeeze in themed answers.

Speaking of themes… there are seven book titles in the grid and puzzle name. (But surely “Yokohama Remission”, “The October Subject”, “Enlisting Latvia” & “Excavate Brasilia!” are all titles to as-yet-unwritten espionage novels, no?!) Before setting this crossword, I’d only read one novel by Ted Allbeury, and it wasn’t one referenced here. I’ve since caught up though, and have grabbed another four via ebay and read them…

…with at least three more now on my list too:

[The Lonely Margins was first published under the pseudonym Patrick Kelly, and Italian Assets as Richard Butler.]
In looking for book cover images, I found this 1979 appearance by Ted on Desert Island Discs (with the music edited out, unfortunately), in case you’re interested. Whilst reading Deep Purple, I found a few tiny scrawls in pencil on the first few pages, and then a lot more over some later pages. I didn’t really think anything of it – the perils of second-hand book buying, right? But then later in the book, I found a bookmark, in the form of a printed out list…

Hah! Was some Russian spy reading cold war thrillers to improve their English? Well, why not? And anyway, that’s only the second oddest thing I’ve found in a second-hand book. (The first is here. Don’t ask, I have no idea!)

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle (feel free to share/RT/etc 🙂 ), and thanks for having a crack at it. But I guess I’ll leave the last word to Ted…

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