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Longhare. Not us, we were replying to thepost at 167. We know exactly who it is, but thanks for the thought!

Although this may not be of much help, thepost, in my view 'writer' is not a particularly accurate description of the subject.

Son1ofover1. Agree about “writer”. But knowing his profession, could he perhaps have dabbled as an “underwriter”? Asking for a friend. 😉

I would have used 'artist' rather than 'writer'....deceptive but accurate.

Wonderful, best crossword for ages. Brutally hard but scrupulously fair. Thank you, Gorrag.

I echo kitsune’s words - very hard but fair. Personally I love it when solving is difficult enough for me to chip away at into the working week.

My thanks to Gorrag and RIP to the “writer”.

This one was hard work, but at no point did I become completely stuck: steady crawling progress was always possible. I did come here for some hints, but took sustenance from early posts about it being a tough one, and finished under my own steam in the end. Just popped here to find a hint for the parsing of 3d, which I found thanks, and to see what the connection is between thematic items and the “writer”, and no one seems to know that. Perhaps we’ll all kick ourselves when the explanation comes out, but if it does turn out to be non-public connection that will be one negative point for me in an otherwise very enjoyable solve. Now going for a lie down!

btw, for me, the perimeter solves came late, with only one or two exceptions. Once the highlighted letters emerged, a very efficiently stored and sorted web site provided a ready set of hints as to what the candidate words for the solutions to the perimeter clues might be!

Not sure if this is the intended link to the thematic items or not but if you Google the writer’s pseudonym, you get something that clearly links death and the thematic items which feels too much of a coincidence to be just chance

If I'm right about what you're referring to, CD, the item in question is linked to a single letter by a hyphen? The descriptions I've found don't specifically mention to the thematic items but could no doubt be used on them, I guess.

There was an earlier post remarking that the editors could have been kinder to new solvers. I must disagree. We have all been new solvers, ans it has taken most of us years of blood, sweat and tears to get to the stage where we can solve a challenge such as this one. As a new solver, I would have been very happy in solving half of the clues in this one and putting it down to expreience.

There are plenty of Listeners these days that are accessible to new solvers. It was really tough as a new solver in the eighties when there were some really brutal puzzles.