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The Listener Crossword by Anax
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Anax's puzzles get better and better! This is a superb barred puzzle with a clever theme, and I am honoured he has offered it to me for publication. With Anax's puzzles fairness and good surface reading of clues can be taken for granted along with ingenuity and wit and this one excels in all respects. Favourite clues: 35 across, 4 down and especially 22 down.

Listener.jpg

In all cases wordplay refers to grid entries, but half of the clues should not – or perhaps should – be taken as read.
 
ACROSS
5 Doctor wants to enter snake country (8)
11 Part of frantic run to bury the dead (5)
12 Show oddly defective hand that has broken skin (6)
13 Evil gang, extremely evil... (6)
14...will ultimately skin wild cat (5)
15 Ready to relax a year on (5)
16 Pervert, deviant, endlessly condemned (6)
18 A soldier in retreat, and not a soldier in the dark (8)
19 For conservationists nothing is this quick! (6)
21 Energy required to interrupt flurry of thought (5)
23 Dirk Gently's introduction in "Attorney before State" (5)
25 Handle I can open after a second (6)
28 In return, submits cover for pine frame (6,2)
30 Blessed with a girl (6)
31 Look into ship's hard journey through mud (5)
33 Group of highly respectable people committing perjury (5)
34 In theory, particles on slug will be random (6)
35 Rough American city in criminal case (6)
36 Better to back journalist given stick (5)
37 Air force surrounds part of hospital (8)

DOWN
1 Complete wimp, but taking out every other man (6)
2 Chop organ out of organ recording (9)
3 Drop small change to website address (4)
4 Form of solar energy that removes irregular rays in a short time (7)
6 Love, rape, torture in Orlando for example (5)
7 Section of petal in umbrella plant (7)
8 Bridge player and partner following through upward trend (5)
9 Attached and badly corroded (6)
10 Climb from bottom to roughly ten (6)
17 Small expletive uttered in failed revolt (9)
20 Bird – gray, not "colourful" (7)
22 Show Donald Duck animation, but not 3D? (7)
23 Revolutionary China espoused a loose attachment to the elderly (6)
24 Good to change sides? This will push one back (1-5)
26 Greenflies concealed within diseased sap (6)
27 Will people ask to hold it? (5)
29 Fixing one's permit (5)
32 Working with Anglicans is demanding (4)

Solution to The Listener Crossword by Anax