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Mystery Setter: Just completed your latest ( January) Magpie offering, excellent.

In many ways this was a lovely puzzle. I’m one of those who struggles with cold solving clues, so it was hard work for me this week, but I liked the fact that a bit of ingenuity meant I could wring just enough out of the middle of the grid to nudge me ever one step forward, and I got there in the end with a real sense of achievement :-) and I learned some nice new words. My BRB certainly got a lot of virtual thumbing this week.

My only grouse would be that several clues have ambiguous ‘extra’ letters, and this makes the endgame a bit more elusive than I think was intended. For example, in 1 I think there are three possible letters (two the same) that could be dropped, although only one leaves valid words (this is not promised by the preamble though). In 27 and 12 there are two possible letters in the same word that could be dropped. If this was intentional extra hardness, fair enough, though it didn’t feel very comfortable; it meant that at first I thought I had just gibberish from the extra letters (because I did!). If it was unintended, then it’s an unfortunate weakness to an otherwise clever and delightful puzzle.

Now all that remains is to remember to deviate from John’s usual standing request regarding how to trim Listener crosswords before sending them in…!

I spent the whole week cold solving most clues, latterly with a lot of help from hints posted here — thanks to everyone who contributed.
As usual in these cases, the extra letters I identified spell out gibberish which was not helpful. However, since this type of code does not alter the letters in the message, I was able to make an intelligent guess at the plain text and all was revealed.
After the recent "scytale" hidden message puzzle, I have no enthusiasm to spend more time on this.
Therefore, in order for me to complete the grid and submit an entry, will some kind soul please let know if the north-westernmost cell in the ciphertext region which contains an ambiguous clash should be resolved to contain a letter in the first half of the alphabet or the second?

If you mean the 2nd letter of 14a, it's in the 2nd half of the alphabet (but I can't see why this would be ambiguous if you have all of the answers and only real words appear outside of the area).

drxx, as per the penultimate sentence in the preamble, there are ambiguities in filling the grid due to some jumbled words not being able to be fully resolved due to the same two letters being in across and down clues. I'm assuming this is a deliberate ploy on the setter's part to avoid someone doing what I'm trying to do: complete the grid fill correctly without the hassle of decrypting the ciphertext.
There are four cells where either of the same two letters can be entered. I was trying not to give away too much information , assuming that anyone who had finished the puzzle the kosher way would have been aware of these ambiguities. Perhaps you got lucky and entered the correct letter in these cells without being aware of this possibility.

I am aware of them, but none of them are where you say - they're in the opposite direction, in fact.
There's no reason to get lucky with this code because the setter has been very generous (or maybe it was a double bluff, knowing how we often overcomplicate things). I did this by breaking down the key into columns the same width as they appear in the grid - it made it slightly harder to keep tack of things and was totally unnecessary (as I soon discovered}.

Perhaps I need to ensure that anyone replying to my query has decrypted the ciphertext and that the resulting plain text is completely correct.

(The cell I was cryptically referring to in my original post is the first in 19ac.)

It's in the first half of the alphabet.

I think you could check that information by writing out the obvious keyword and completing the coded sequence - it shouldn't take more than a few minutes, jif73.

And take another look at this sentence -
''will some kind soul please let know if the north-westernmost cell in the ciphertext region which contains an ambiguous clash should be resolved to contain a letter in the first half of the alphabet or the second?''
Do you see the possible ambiguity there?