THE THIRD KEY. J. Arthur Rank / Ealing Studios, UK, 1956. Original title: The Long Arm. J ack Hawkins, John Stratton, Dorothy Alison, Michael Brooke, Sam Kydd, Glyn Houston. Director: Charles Frend.

   A business in Westminster is burgled, and when the police arrive they are greeted by a nightwatchman. The safe has been opened with a key and its contents stolen. The following day, however, it emerges that the nightwatchman was actually the thief in disguise, and the real nightwatchman is in hospital with a burst appendix. Superintendent Tom Halliday (Jack Hawkins) and his new Detective Sergeant Ward (John Stratton) begin their hunt for the fraud.

   With the help of his boss and friend Chief Superintendent Jim Malcolm (Geoffrey Keen), Halliday discovers that there have been more than a dozen safe-breaking jobs all across Britain, with each involving the same make of safe.

   With no suspects at the manufacturer, the case seems to have reached a dead end, until the thief strikes again and an innocent bystander is killed with the getaway car. The vehicle is later found in a scrapyard, inside of which lies a newspaper that leads Halliday and Ward all the way to Snowdonia, North Wales, and a Mr Gilson, a deceased former employee of the safe manufacturer.

   The pair discover that there are twenty-eight identical safes in London. The most lucrative haul will come from one that is located at the Royal Festival Hall, where a trap is duly set for the thief…

   This mid-fifties police procedural plays like an ever so slightly grittier episode of Dixon of Dock Green, with always-reliable Jack Hawkins, famous at the time for playing resolute men of sturdy, sensible authority, as the investigating officer. An almost documentary style keeps this part of the realist school of detective drama, with only occasional moments of gentle humour, mostly between Halliday and his new sidekick, who, in a running gag that’s more of a leisurely stroll, is forever interested in getting off work to see his girlfriend.

   The cast is made up of dependable stalwarts of the era, with the likes of Geoffrey Keen (so often excellent in these sort of roles, who sometimes got the chance himself of playing the main detective in lower-budgeted B-films), Sydney Tafler (a big favourite of mine, here playing a character named ‘Creasey’, presumably because of big-name crime writer of the time John Creasey), and Ralph Truman.

   Ian Bannen also appears as the victim of the hit and run, to whom Halliday somewhat insensitively questions while on his death bed, and would go on to play the lead role in the amiable Scottish farce Waking Ned over forty years later.

   A bunch of other actors with walk-on roles, such as Stafford Johns, would go on to appear as police officers again in the rather more grim Z Cars and Softly, Softly, a dramatic direction which would lead to The Sweeney and everything else that makes The Third Key now seem antiquated and, despite its efforts at realism, a little unsophisticated.

   That’s probably ungenerous, as middle-class police investigating mostly non-violent crimes is no less realistic than cockney, blue-collar police chasing rapists, but it nonetheless feels more genteel when you have Hawkins’ wife fussing about him being late for tea.

   She is, by the way, one of only three women to be given any meaningful role, out of five who appear in the whole film, while most of the cast are middle-class, middle-aged men, with the only ones left over being a street-seller hawking his wares, and Nicholas Parsons as a beat constable.

   In fact, thanks to a scene in which Halliday’s son has a birthday party, and another in which a young urchin played by Frazer Hines (of ‘60s Doctor Who and evergreen rural soap Emmerdale) offers a significant lead, there are several more prepubescent boys in the film than women.

   Much of which you have to accept with a picture of this vintage, not least as these glimpses into a bygone era are often so interesting, with the location work in particular standing out. The narrative itself may seem a little ho-hum, with the only action being an exciting finale in which Hawkins grips recklessly to the bonnet of an escaping car (the idea of handcuffing the villain not having occurred to the experienced detective).

   The film isn’t long, and more focused and markedly less grim than its spiritual successor Gideon’s Day a couple of years later, in which Hawkins plays another Scotland Yard man struggling to juggle serious police work with his home life and family. The main difference there is that he has a teenage daughter instead of a young son, and his wife is rather less worried about him.

Rating: ***

SUSAN DUNLAP – An Equal Opportunity Death. Vejay Haskell #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1984. Dell, paperback, 1994.

   Veronica (“Vejay”) Haskell is something of a maverick, even for today’s new breed of woman: She has fled a picture-perfect marriage, a well-paying executive position, and all the comforts of life in San Francisco for a cold little house and an arduous job as a Pacific Gas & Electric Company meter reader in the Russian River area of northern California.

   The rainy season takes its toll on Vejay, and she takes an illegal sick day; but instead of staying home, she goes to friend Frank Goulet’s bar, quarrels with him, and when Frank turns up murdered, she finds herself the prime suspect.

   Vejay quickly decides that local sheriff Wescott isn’t going to look far for the killer; and she wonders about a number of things, including the call that Frank Goulet received at his bar while she was there — a call that prompted him to cancel the date they’d just made and thus provoked their quarrel.

   Carefully (at first) she sets out to question friends and residents in the area: the warm and hospitable Fortmiglic clan; Paul and Patsy Fernandez, former hippies who now own a canoe-rental business; Madge Oombs, one of the local antique dealers; Skip Bolio, a realtor; and Ned Jacobs, ranger at the nearby state park. As Yejay probes deeper, she finds herself the target of hostility, not only from the law but from these former friends and neighbors.

   Vejay is forthright and refreshing, and her observations on the other denizens of the area bring them fully alive in all their peculiarities. Dunlap has a fine touch for setting, and you’ll probably want to read this one curled up in front of a warm fire, since the descriptions of the biting cold and wetness of the Russian River area during flood season will chill you.

   A second Vejay Haskell novel, The Bohemian Connection, was published in 1985; in this one, she investigates strange goings-on that center on the Bohemian Club’s famous summer encampment at their Russian River grove. Dunlap is also the author of two novels about Berkeley policewoman Jill Smith — As a Favor (1984) and Karma (1984 ) — which skillfully capture the flavor of that offbeat and iconoclastic university town.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   
          —–

Bibliographic Update: A third and final book in the series was The Last Annual Slugfest (1986), and adding to the total in the Jill Smith series were eight more, making ten in all. The last one, Cop Out, appeared in 1997. Susan Dunlap also wrote four adventures of female PI Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, seven books featuring stuntwoman Darcy Lott, one standalone mystery, and three collections of short stories.

ERSKINE CALDWELL – Poor Fool. Rariora Press, hardcover, 1930 (limited edition of 1000 copies; illustrations by Alexander Couard). Novel Selections #52, digest paperback, 1953. Louisiana State University Press, softcover, 1994.

   Before Caldwell learned to weave the absurd humor of the dispossessed into the rural noirs of Tobacco Road and God’s Litt;e Acre, he wrote a couple of diabolically dark grotesques: The Bastard and Poor Fool.

   Poor Fool is the story of washed-up boxer Blondy Niles. We first find Blondy lying in a gutter, picked up by a prostitute named Louise, who wants to save him and make him her very own. Louise became a prostitute because she was so god-damned lonely. It seemed like a way around it. Plus you got paid. Mostly.

   Salty Banks is a boxing promoter. He’s got a contender, Knockout Harris. He figures he can make a quick bundle letting a hasbeen like Blondy knock out Knockout, then schedule a second match where Knockout wins. He promises Blondy $10,000 he never intends to pay.

   Blondy takes the deal, and it goes down like the Titanic.

   Meanwhile, Louise gets murdered and Blondy ends up working at an abortion motel, 15 women at a time on the 3rd floor, hacked by a hack, one or two women dying a day, their bodies sold for $5.00 a piece by the greedy landlady and ‘nurse’, Mrs. Boxx.

   Mrs. Boxx has a castrated husband who carries a pouch with three marbles in it where his manhood used to be. Mr. Boxx spends his days in visitation with the dead. His ex-wife is in the cemetery:

   “I’ve got a private way of getting down there where she is. You know, there are a lot of them down there, men and women. They have a good time too. They have dug out a big room down there and connected up all the coffins with halls. They sleep in the coffins and then walk around visiting each other and meeting in a big room to talk and sing. They have dances sometimes too. They have a good time down there, you can bet your boots! You know, the men and women down there carry on just like they do up here….Oh, I had a good time. A damn good time. I went to see my wife and she took me in her coffin and we stayed there an hour or so. Say, you know, I bought my wife a fine coffin. I didn’t think so much about it when I got it, but yesterday when I saw it I was real proud of myself for getting her such a nice and fancy one. It’s all padded and lined with soft white silk cloth and fixed up nice. She’s crazy about it, too. And say, you should see the men down there…they are the funniest looking people you ever saw. All of them wear coats with no backs to them and a lot of them have pants with only the top part.”

   Mrs. Boxx decides to castrate Blondy too, to make him nice and docile. Blondy’s having none of it, and is rescued by the Boxxes’ daughter Dorothy. They run away together.

   Blondy decides it’s time to get paid his $10 grand by Salty. He hears thru the grapevine that it was Salty who murdered Blondy’s girl Louise because she was wise to Salty’s ways. So Blondy decides it’s curtains for Salty, and gets himself a gun.

   And then the showdown.

         ——

   Both this novel and The Bastard (as well as Bodies Are Dust by PJ Wolfson) are the blackest of noirs, nary a sliver of light shines thru. No redemption, and pretty much no dramatic arc. Just quick descent from bad to worse. From worse to worst.

   It’s not really any fun. On the other hand, one has to appreciate the artistic integrity of a work whose very darkness damns it to instant obscurity. Aborted to the darkness from whence it came.
   

JOSEPH CONRAD – Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Originally published serially in monthly installments of T.P.’s Weekly. First published in book form, 1904. Reprinted many times.

   I got into reading Joseph Conrad, and though I’ve yet to find anything as good as Victory, he remains a source of interest. Almyer’s Folly (1895) and Chance (1913) are relatively uneventless; there’s action in them — piracy, gun-running, swindles, murder — but it all seems to happen at one remove, like an artifact the reader discovers rather than an event happening to the characters.

   Nostromo (1904), on the other hand, offers an epic of Flashman proportions, with wars, plots, betrayals, treasure, hair’s-breadth escapes and a thoughtful ending splashed across a colorful Latin-American background.

   Amid all this struts the eponymous Nostromo, officially little more than the foreman of dock loaders in a small coastal town of a banana republic, but a local hero of some stature — the book opens with his cargadores putting down a riot and saving the lives of his old friends, then parading through the town in triumph. Nostromo, though, is a bit more than just a B-movie swashbuckler, and as he finds himself smuggling a barge full of silver out of the nation before the Revolutionaries can get it, then riding recklessly cross-country to fetch help for his beleaguered employers, he begins to wonder just what he’s doing all this for.

   Had Nostromo just revolved around its hero, like any sensible adventure story, it would have been — well —  just any sensible adventure story. Nostromo, however, remains just a piece of the complex and colorful canvas that is Nostromo, as Conrad evokes a host of three-dimensional characters to play off its hero (Obsessive miner, mysterious doctor, boulevardier activist, local outlaw, etc), and provides them with detailed histories of their own.

   I should add, perhaps, that this does not exactly produce an easily readable tale: there are flashbacks within flashbacks, flash-forwards and (I think) flash-forwards within flash-forwards, all of which make for a — um — challenging read. They do not, however, vitiate the power of the action scenes or obscure the haunting irony of Nostromo‘s — and Nostromo’s — end.

   
       —-
NOTE: Dan’s review of the 1997 BBC TV miniseries based on the book can be found here.

LARCENY, INC. Warner Bros., 1952.  95 min. Edward G. Robinson, Broderick Crawford, Jane Wyman, Jack Carson, Edward Brophy, Anthony Quinn, Harry Davenport, John Qualen, Grant Mitchell, Barbara Jo Allen, Jackie C. Gleason. Based on the play The Night Before Christmas by Laura and S. J. Perelman.  Director: Lloyd Bacon.

         “Weepy, I don’t like the idea of going into a bank through the front door.”

   Edward G. plays J. Chalmers Maxwell, known to his associates as “Pressure.” He and his not-so-bright pal Jug Martin (played to lunk-headed perfection by the greatly underrated Broderick Crawford) have just been released from prison and plan to go straight. All they need is some money to buy a dog track in Florida, but when Pressure applies for a loan at the bank. he is turned down — the “c” word: collateral. (Those were the days when bankers actually considered such things.)

   Pressure figures that to get the dough he needs for his enterprise, why he’ll just have to extract it from the very bank that turned down his application, nyah. But he’ll need a cover and finds it in a luggage shop located right next door. He buys the shop, not realizing until later that he has acquired a cash cow.

   Oddly enough, in spite of a plethora of criminals, some with guns, nobody dies in this movie.

   The entire cast is great, but this is still very much Edward G.’s show.
   

MANNIX “The Name Is Mannix.” CBS / Desilu. 16 September 1967 (Season 1, Episode 1). Mike Connors (Joe Mannix). Joseph Campanella (Lew Wickersham). Guest Cast: Lloyd Nolan, Kim Hunter, John Colicos, Barbara Anderson. Created by Richard Levinson & William Link. Developed & written by Bruce Geller. Director: Leonard J. Horn. Current streaming on Amazon Prime.

   Anyone who’s a fan of old TV private eye shows from the 1960s and 70s (and hopefully that includes you in amongst them) knows that the first season was an anomaly. It featured Mannix as a PI all right, but the gimmick was that he was a square peg in a round hole, as the old saying would have it. He worked for a corporate outfit called Intertect, whose approach to PI work was the use of computers, — punch cards and all, back in the Stone Age. Mannix, on the other hand, was a hands-on kind of guy when he was working, just like every other PI who had come along before him.

   That whole premise didn’t last long. After just one season, Mannix moved on to having his own office, complete with his own secretary and his own cases.

   The only reason he didn’t get fired from Intertect sooner was that he was the best guy they had working for them. Which is why he’s the one who’s called on to work on a case of kidnapping, that of the stepdaughter (Barbara Anderson) of a retired gangster (Lloyd Nolan).

   At which point the whole computerized company facade presented to the public goes out the window. Mannix does his own thing, no matter what the case is, or what the client may think he wants. A kidnapping case is always a good one for a pilot episode of any PI ever shown on TV or the movies and this is a good one. Using the scenic beauty of the area in and around Palm Springs as a backdrop, Mannix tackles this new case with vim and vigor — and brains — a most worthy combination.

   At which next point it can be noted that Mannix gets clocked on the head once, the first of many such incidents as the series progressed.

   I thought I knew which way the story line was going, and wow was I surprised when it didn’t go that way. Until, that is, another twist in the tale decided that my ending was OK after all. Maybe that, or I’ve been watching TV shows such as this one for as long as I can remember.

   As for the premise, no matter which one, Mike Connors’ ruggedly handsome screen presence was more than satisfactory for the series to stay on the air for eight full seasons. You can’t argue with success like that.

JOHN EDWARD BRUCE – The Black Sleuth. Northeastern University Press, hardcover, 2002. Edited by John Cullen Gruesser. First serialized in McGirt’s Magazine, circa 1907 to 1909.

   Sadipe Okukenu is a black sleuth, working for the International Detective Agency at the first turn of the 20th Century, chasing down jewel thieves.

   The majority of the book though is I guess what edumacated people call a bildungsroman. That is to say, we start off in West Africa, with Sadipe as a young man. He is from a family of scholars and excels in mathematics and languages.

   To further his education he decides to sail to Maine to learn what he can of America. He gains even more facility in math and languages, and the town decides to pay his way to a Tuskegee lookalike to study with a Booker T. Washington ringer.

   On the train down South, once they pass the Mason-Dixon line, Sadipe starts to be treated as sub-human, despite his purchase of a 1st class ticket. He’s not allowed in the dining car. And the conductor tries to force him back into the stinking back car reserved for animals and Blacks (though ‘Blacks’ is not the word used by the conductor — as Sadipe is fond of pointing out, the N-word has two g’s in it because the imbecilic whites who use the term think that ‘negro’ has two ‘g’s.).

   A retired general happens to be in the car, and decides to lend Sadipe a hand. And a revolver.

   Sadipe tells the conductor that he purchased a 1st class ticket, and that if he wants to force him back to the Black car, he’ll have to kill him first and move his corpse back there. At this, the black porters turn on the conductor, and the northerners traveling south start cheering. The conductor gives up and lets Sadipe be.

   The retired general is suitably impressed by how Sadipe handles himself — and says if he ever gets sick of Tuskeegee, to let him know: He’s got friends in interesting places.

   Arriving at Tuskegee, greeted by the Booker T. clone, Sadipe is shocked by the racial epithets hurled their way by the rednecks as they make their way to campus. Booker T. says it’s always best to ignore those folks. Sadipe says he’s not so sure he can do that. It’s the first sign that this matriculation is in trouble.

   At the Saturday service at the church, a white Methodist pastor who served an African missionary, gives a sermon about the heathens and savages of Africa and how lucky the world is to have white Christians to save their putrid souls.

   Sadipe has heard enough:

   
   Sadipe’s address is published in the white paper in an emergency edition, insinuating that a lynching must quell the uppity in the town’s midst. Sadipe is able to escape with his life to Washington D.C., where the general from the train arranges for a job with the International Detective Agency.

   Sadipe, with his intelligence, his multilingualism, and his black skin is a perfect fit for the Agency. White criminals are just as racist as anyone else. And their casual racism blinds them to the fact that the Black servant in their midst might comprehend their blueprints, their use of French and German. Playing up to Jim Crow might just be a perfect disguise for a savvy detective. And Sadipe’s out to prove it.

   And prove it he does, enwebbing and ensnaring four near-smart international jewel grifters in the act. Probably…..

   Yet this is where it ends. Weird. Because the book isn’t advertised as ‘unfinished’. But it appears that that is just what it is: Unfinished. The story was published serially in a small circulation newspaper between 1907-1909. Was there more? Not that anyone has been able to find.

   I sought out this book after reading Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective entry on Three Gun Terry:

   
   However, Sadipe is no hard boiled detective. He’s too intelligent and speaks English in far too literate a fashion to fit in much with Sam Spade, Mike Hammer and their ilk. Perhaps he fits in better with Marlowe and Spenser. But still, his prey are international gentlemen (and a gentlewoman) thieves, and he has little time or inclination to hang with the salty underbelly of the criminal world and to engage in their hardboiled vernacular.

   The book was fairly enjoyable. But I would have been both less likely to have read it and less disappointed to have done so had there been a fair warning that the story was incomplete. As it is, it’s a good reminder that Jim Crow existed long before Rosa Parks. The groundwork for a pretty good international detective is laid here. But laid here merely to rest for over a century — with nary a crime to solve.

   So yeah. Disappointed? Yeah — a bit. But still I’m glad to have read it. And if I had read ahead of time that the thing was only of historical interest I would not have read it. Because I don’t read for history. I read for fun.

DAPHNE Du MAURIER – Rebecca. Victor Gollancz Ltd., UK, hardcover, August 1938. Doubleday, US, hardcover, September 1938.  Reprinted many times. in both hardcover and paperback.

   The title character of this immensely popular novel never appears “on stage,” since she is dead long before the story starts. Her persona, however, is the moving force behind the narrative, and she is so well realized that the reader comes to feel he has met her many times. The other characters, including the protagonist, fail to measure up to Rebecca, and this creates a peculiar imbalance that makes one wonder why one is reading about them when she is obviously much more fascinating.

   The heroine of the story — referred to after her marriage as only “Mrs. de Winter” and before that as nothing at all — holds a position as lady’s companion for an American woman who is vacationing on the Cote d’Azur. Invoking a distant connection, the old woman, Mrs. Van Hopper, strikes up an acquaintance with Maxim de Winter, owner of the grand English estate of Manderley and recent widower.

   When Mrs. Van Hopper becomes ill, her companion continues the acquaintance and falls in love with de Winter. They marry and return to Manderley, where the hostility of the housekeeper, who was devoted to Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, and continual reminders of the beautiful, strong-willed woman she has succeeded cast a pall over the marriage.

   The new Mrs. de Winter fears she can never compete with such a paragon as Rebecca, but gradually the truth about the woman emerges, and she must confront a greater, unexpected horror. There is an irony about the ending, which leaves the heroine stronger and wiser, yet immersed in a sorrow from which she will never escape.

   Rebecca was made into an excellent film in 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson. Du Maurier’s 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel was also filmed (1953). In addition, she produced such popular books as Jamaica Inn (her first novel and also a Hitchcock film, in 1936) and The House on the Strand (1969).

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2023. Issue #64. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The White Elephant Mystery by Ellery Queen, Jr.

   If you like detective fiction in any or all of its permutations then you can’t go wrong with Old-Time Detection. The new mingles with the old (which means, in most cases, the classic), leaving plenty for the reader to feast on.

   Among the delectations: an interview with a science fiction/fantasy/detective story author; plenty of well-researched background on the creator of the world’s most famous criminal lawyer; the latest (at the time) paperback reprints from the seventies; a review of a collection of stories by the master of noir; a long-lost Dr. Poggioli story and a witty and amusing self-assessment by its author; a view of the “master conjurer” of fair play detection and a look at how he lived; news about the creator of Poirot and Marple and how the current generation is handling (and, in too many cases, mishandling) her works; a glance at how today’s publishers seem to be on some sort of nostalgia kick, which is good news for detec-fic aficionados; words about the undisputed “king of the classical whodunit”; and the editor’s appraisal of a kids’ novel that even adults can enjoy.

   In it you will find:

(1) A 1976 interview with Isaac Asimov in EQMM: “I was the comic relief …”

(2) Francis M. Nevins gives us the first part of a multipart essay (2010) about Erle Stanley Gardner; however: “Those wishing to read about Gardner’s Perry Mason character must wait for Part Two.”

(3) Charles Shibuk continues his summary (1973) of the “paperback revolution” in detective/mystery publishing that was occurring half a century ago, focusing on Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Amanda Cross, Carter Dickson (otherwise JDC), Erle Stanley Gardner, Frank Gruber, Ngaio Marsh, Bill Pronzini, Rex Stout, Julian Symons, and Charles Williams.

(4) This is followed by Shibuk’s review (1975) of Nightwebs (1971), a collection of Cornell Woolrich’s “mainly unfamiliar works,” edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.: “Some of these stories are of extremely high quality, but alas, there is also much dross.”

(5) The issue’s centerpiece story is T. S. Stribling’s “The Mystery of the Paper Wad” (EQMM, 1946), which hasn’t been seen generally since first publication, followed by Stribling’s own “The Autobiography of an Ingenious Author” (1932): “The criminologist smiled at the illusion held by every man that with him all things, crimes and virtues, are possible.”

(6) In “The Full Mandrake” (2023), Rupert Holmes offers us “an appreciation of John Dickson Carr”: “If the classic fair play detective story is the magic act of literature, then John Dickson Carr is forever its master conjurer . . .”

(7) Douglas G. Greene’s assessment (1995) of JDC’s A Graveyard To Let (1949) (“. . . still, the swimming-pool gimmick is beautifully handled”), as well as Carr’s lifestyle as a New Yorker: “While he wrote in his attic study, Carr smoked continuously and tossed the cigarette butts on uncarpeted parts of the floor . . .”

(8) Dr. John Curran’s “Christie Corner” (2023) looks at what’s happening to AC’s heritage and finds all is not well, warning us about one project: “AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS.”

(9) Michael Dirda’s survey of the current scene, “Classical Mysteries Are Having a Moment” (2023): “. . . for devotees of old-time detection, recent publishing does seem surprisingly retrospective, even nostalgic.”

(10) Jon L. Breen’s article “Edward D. Hoch: King of the Classical Whodunit” (2008): “He practiced the increasingly lost art of the classical detective short story better than all but a handful of writers in the history of the genre.”

(11) There’s a mini-review of The White Elephant Mystery (1950) by Arthur Vidro: “It’s well-plotted and well-written . . .”

(12) As usual there’s a puzzle (and it’s a dilly).

(13) The issue ends with the sad news of Marvin Lachman’s passing: “Without Marv, we [at OTD] would have lacked the participation of leading professionals.”

      ____

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