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Toughie No. 55 — cryptic crossword

A toughie puzzle: 40 clues on a 15×15 grid. Solve it online — check your answers as you go, ask for a hint, and read how each clue works once it is solved.

Across

  1. Mother's quiet lampoon is a washout (4,5)
  2. Hot air and parking make one catch one's breath (4)
  3. Fault, in part, is exculpated (5)
  4. Noble and unknown, doing time, is first to rise (5,4)
  5. Mount's occupant is an additional clause (5)
  6. On the ball later, surprisingly (5)
  7. Aware of a badly drafted zoning act (9)
  8. Physicist found in safer mineshaft (5)
  9. Knight's moment, we hear, in the hours of darkness (9)
  10. Moved to and fro, chanted about the west (5)
  11. A set up gone wrong! (5)
  12. Big ribs, eh, when cooked? Nonsense! (9)
  13. Service in the east — a curving cue shot (5)
  14. Shoot stem cut back, becoming the sleekest (9)
  15. Fib in the article? Not from these parts (5)
  16. Leans, charges at windmills (5)
  17. Complaints from sick headlands (9)
  18. Diplomat shows jealousy about nothing (5)
  19. Dane at sea becomes a college head (4)
  20. Without stopping, this clue goes on and on and on and (9)

Down

  1. Perish, one of a pair thrown (3)
  2. Parisian death pledges are loans on property (9)
  3. Pen's catalogue for a writer with flair (7)
  4. Grain unit spilling out, relieving oneself (9)
  5. Morbid etiquette conceals a bathroom fitting (5)
  6. Twisting luge, I show cunning (5)
  7. Tree, more bare when beheaded (5)
  8. Water helps permeate soil, concealing seed (5)
  9. Farewell snap? It gets the last word (7,4)
  10. Trades roughly on rafts (6)
  11. Mounted scam worked out and brought to completion (11)
  12. Fix trouble inside and get caught up in the quarrel (9)
  13. College poems make up worlds (9)
  14. Adolescents, why so tiny? (6)
  15. Meet Rex, terribly severe (7)
  16. Get into a line! (5)
  17. Woodland in smashed vials (5)
  18. Minutes going up make a surgical thread (5)
  19. Polish brilliance (5)
  20. Cunning, and oddly salty (3)

More: Toughie cryptic crosswords.

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