The Stickler Weekly 40 Solution

Devices are employed by setters to create the wordplay parts of clues. I like the term “device”, but as there’s no formal cryptic crossword glossary, other setters may use a different word for the same thing. The most common devices setters use are anagram, hidden, container and its contents, charade, sounds like, truncation, subtraction and alternate letters. A clue’s wordplay may be made up totally of one of these or a mixture of them. A one-device clue, with the possible exception of a charade, should, in theory, be easier to solve than a mixed-device clue as there’s less for the solver to grapple with. Charades are often devoid of indicators which can make them hard to decipher, where the rest will have tell-tale indicators that solvers are looking for.
There are other devices, of course, like overlapping, letter shifting & switching and &lit that come up less often than the rest. These tend to be as a result of opportunity rather than by design as the answer word must suit the device for a clue to work. This is true in all cases but some devices are more versatile than others.
I used a device in this puzzle that I haven’t mentioned and that I don’t use often as its indicators leave no doubt (like with the boring Spoonerism) what a solver must do: it’s the reverse wordplay. In 15-across, “Shot lodged in back of podium? Quite the contrary (6)”, “Quite the contrary” indicates that what precedes it must be taken in the opposite way. This still leaves a small quandary: do we reverse the container and its contents components or do we just take the “front of podium” rather than the “back of podium”? Either is valid but only one results in a word that matches the definition.