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Title: “The Purloined Letters”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a fictional detective.
Answer: RABBI SMALL
Correct entries: 567 overall, 510 of which were solo

Guest puzzle last week from Dean Silverberg where solvers soon began realizing that some of those answers didn’t quite make sense. Specifically:

1-A: [Word coined by the US Navy in 1940] = RAID. Could that possibly be so recent a coinage?
10-A: [French impressionist Claude] = MOAN. Never heard of that guy, but the art world is huge…
24-A: [Danger from dogs] = RAY. Maybe dogs emit dangerous rays? OK…
36-A: [Trapper’s tentmate, on “M*A*S*H”] = HAWK. Well it was “Hawkeye,” but I guess they occasionally called him “Hawk” for short maybe?
39-A: [Generosity] = LARGE. Seems like a part-of-speech mismatch but maybe I’m missing something…
44-A: [Giant in Jewish folklore] = GOAL. OK, wait a second. There’s a “golem” giant in Jewish folklore, which doesn’t mean there also couldn’t be a giant named “goal,” but something weird is going on here…
71-A: [Boneless cut] = PHIL. Not filet? Oh, now I see it…
76-A: [Gentle colors] = PAST. Makes zero sense, but aha!…

So trick was: these entries have all had a letter sound “purloined” from their answers, which the solver must fill in. So RADAR is actually the 1940 US Navy coinage, not RAID, and you add an “R” sound to get it. Similarly we get Claude MONET by adding an “A” sound to MOAN.

In full they are are:

RAID + R = RADAR
MOAN + A = MONET
RAY + BB = RABIES. Those are “B’s” plural, a cute curveball for the solver to negotiate.
HAWK + I = HAWKEYE
GOAL + M = GOLEM
LARGE + S = LARGESSE
PHIL + A = FILET
PAST + LL = PASTELS (that same curveball again for the double letter; PAST + L’S

Put them together and you have contest answer RABBI SMALL, a.k.a. Rabbi David Small of author Harry Kemelman’s mystery series. Not quite as well-known as some other detectives, true, but you may recognize them better from their day-of-the-week titles such as Monday the Rabbi Took Off and Friday the Rabbi Slept Late.

touchdown says:

Friday the Rabbi Solved Metas?

Ale M says:

Fun twist with the double letters!

Agreed, but Tyler Hinman didn’t need them:

Credit to Google for figuring out the answer from “rabismal detective”

Bird Lives had no trouble with it:

Friday the solvers finished early.

Same with Laura M:

I read (and liked) these books! Got “Friday the Rabbi Slept Late” as a gift way back when I was a teenager, and read most of the rest of the series. Great puzzle!

Evad similarly had no problems:

Solved this one with EE!

And finally, jjl writes:

Dean, If that is your first meta, you may have found a new calling. Great idea and construction. I loved the Bs and Ls final get to have it all fall in place. Thank you for your service, abroad and, lately, here at home!

Agreed — very nice work, Dean, and thanks for pinch-hitting!

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

What 10-letter creature has visited this puzzle grid?

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.