8. Cryptic crosswords -Take a letter out

For Blaugust this year I decided to publish a series of cryptic crossword posts.
I'm aiming for one a day. Unfortunately for some of the time I will be camping, so I hope to manage this, but it might get a bit tricky if I have no internet access.

Many of our friends over the years have said that cryptic crosswords don't make sense. They certainly do play with your mind, and that is why I take delight in them.  I love the surprising discovery inside a puzzle and the challenge of twisting the usual thought patterns and making them do something different.

So here is today's offering...

Sometimes you need to remove one letter from a word

Tool having sketchy use, except for book ending (6)- Advertiser Feb 5th 2016
Book ending=k
Take the k out of sketchy
Now think of a tool that is an anagram of the remaining letters.
A scythe!

Often this involves removing the front or last letter of a word , as in the example below

One below the top of fireplace (5) Advertiser 8/2/16
"Below the top of " is the indicator that you need to lose the top of the word
One is the straight clue for the word that you need to lose the top of
One =single
Fireplace is the straight clue
Now this was a challenge for us because we were not familiar with he word "ingle" meaning fireplace. Once we had the I_G_E though, it became pretty clear that the word we were going from might be single, and thus we looked up ingle and found that it can, indeed, mean fireplace.

Valued the shortage and paucity (6 ) Advertiser 1/3/16
"Paucity" is the straight clue
"Valued"=dear
"Shortage" is the indicator
"The"shortage =th
The answer is DEARTH


Pass up electing assembly after spurning international leader (7) Advertiser 26/8/2016
Here the bit we need to leave out (spurn) is the international leader (i)
That leaves us trying to figure out what we need to leave it out of.
If we take the word "electing" and leave out the I we have the right number of letters to assemble...
Now let's see. .. we want something that means pass up...
Neglect!


Indicators:

• Except for
• Below the top
• Above the bottom
• Shortage
• Spurn
• Leave 
• Without