£100 PRIZE CROSSWORD

1 Absolutely disliked and loathed… and a mysterious death (5) 4 and 11 Across Our helicopter goes off to fetch a famous detective (7,6)

8 A ragtime puzzle for Georges Simenon’s policeman (7)

9 Crazy for Morse? Yes, somewhat mad, OTT, yelling (5) 10 Coven sign shows where Sweeny Todd’s pies were baked (5) 11 See 4 Across 14 The urgency of Agatha’s terror (5) 16 Tampered with the pies, a dark greyish yellow brown (5)

18 The threat or risk that always lurks in a ghastly garden (6) 21 Miss Marple returned shortly to look for the four-wheeled carriages (5) 24 Little Eve’s running round to get the carer’s job in Stephen King’s Misery movie (5) 25 Insane? Sounds like Agatha Christie’s broken mirror book (7) 26 The rate changes where The Mousetrap is performed (7) 27 What an informer or star in Phantom of the Opera does (5) 1 It’s where Macaulay was left alone… oh, upsetting me (4) 2 Dishonest guys wrapped in cloth – i.e. vestments (7)

3 Drive mad with a bit of murder, Angela? (7) 4 This creeps about with bats and blows (4) 5 Waves and signals from Auntie? Yes, a few – so I darted back (5) 6 Speak out when the nutter blows his top (5) 7 A tattered tiny page from the land of Death on the Nile (8) 12 Resentment and rage that can arise in a murder indoors (3)

13 An awful wound – hit in a Christie mystery, for instance (8)

15 A sharp pull from the ugliest ghoul initially (3) 16 Bloodcurdling cries after some poisonous cream scones (7) 17 Persistently question family with a Hallowe’en gourd (7) 19 Poisoner Vera reveals what a scaredy cat lacks (5)

20 Part of the seventeenth murder mystery weekend, say (5) 22 Spots another crime nearby – evil, first and foremost (4)

23 I’d gone to the south-east briefly for a spooky day of murder in March (4)