The Art of Love

Bodie/Doyle Fanfiction
Title:	The Art of Love
Author(s):	Alexfandra
Date(s):	1995
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	The Professionals
External Links:	The Art of Love
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The Art of Love is a Bodie/Doyle story by Alexfandra.

It was published in Truth to Tell and is online.

Comments from the author:

... the focus [of good writing] is on telling a good story about intriguing characters in a difficult situation, and that doesn't change. I'm usually very aware of what I'm doing when I do write something "over the top" - I knew, for instance, that "The Art of Love" was pure melodrama, and I wanted to write it that way, just for the fun of it. Same with the story I did for the Media Cannibals' "Guilty Pleasures" zine.

Summaries

Author's summary (from the original zine flyer):

"Bodie goes undercover in the art world, seeking the connection between two dead models and a KGB blackmail ring. Could Ray Doyle, an artist Bodie becomes quite attached to, be involved?"

"Bodie is sent undercover to get close the only link between two young people who have died mysteriously and similarly, an artist they both posed for named Ray Doyle. Becoming Doyle's model and lover is easy enough, but falling in love was never part of the plan. Believing in Doyle's innocence it's up to Bodie to discover who is behind the crimes and the framing of Doyle.

"D is an artist and B is assigned to seduce him in order to investigate D's possible involvement in a blackmailing case. B&D fall in love but D finds out the truth about B spying on him and they have a bitter quarrel. Immediately after there is a shootout - D is innocent but his flatmate is the culprit. After some heartache, D realizes that lies or not he loves B and gives him a second chance.

Reactions and Reviews

This story is slightly AU, Bodie is in CI5 and Doyle is not, he's an artist.

Two young people who modelled for Raymond Doyle were used for blackmail and are now murdered. Bodie has to go undercover as a model, to find out if Doyle or his friends have anything to do with it.

They get on well together, very well and a relationship is beginning to develop. Bodie however still needs to go through with his investigation.

And then Ray Doyle finds out who Bodie really is.

Oh I do love all of this writer's work and The Art of Love is a particular favourite of mine. Thanks for reccing it and for reminding me to read it again!

This is an A/U from the Princess of Purity, I almost died of shock. It's a pretty standard '"fuck the suspect to get close to him, then fall in love'" plotline. I loved the set-up. Bodie as an artist model is a very attractive idea for me. I missed, however, the pieces of getting to know one another, the developing of attraction and respect. Basically, they meet, they feel attraction, they fuck, they feel an odd affinity for one another, then they're in love. The discovery of the plot, anger & betrayal, and then restoration of the relationship were efficent but not emotionally gripping. And, I guess, that's my main difficulty. There's nothing WRONG with this, and many things are right. But I wanted something SPECIAL, and I missed getting it.

I think Alexandra was one of the first authors I found in the Pros fandom. This was when I was searching the internet for MfU stories, and found new fandoms all the time. I found Pros, S&H and many more. Two stories I remember clearly from that time are The Art of Love by Alexandra and Music of the Heart by Elessar -- they've stayed with me until now, and I still love them as much as I did then when I first found them. ♥...

Bodie... under cover... literally. Delicious. <-- this alone would make me want to read this fic. <3…

[excerpt snipped]

Doyle is the easy lay in this duo, but I guess Bodie qualifies too (he did accept the op after all), and Doyle falls for Bodie's charm in a matter of hours -- not that Bodie's any better... he probably fell for Doyle the moment he opened that file. And they continue on from there. The first meeting goes smooth, and because the lads are the lads -- no matter what univers -- they always have their special connection (gen or slash).[excerpt snipped]

[excerpt snipped]

The evil guys in this fic, the ones you hardly hear or see anything from, is the KGB. They use poor and defensless art students to perform their dirty task of badger jobs and blackmail, and they all end up very dead. There's no hope for either the victims or the villains in this fic, because either the KGB goes all macho or Bodie saves the day.

There's even a woman in this fic, which I find highly annoying, (I know, I'm hopeless. I'm hostile agianst my own sex *g*), but she's needed to give the fic a nice "I will creep you out" feeling -- the KGB failing in doing so. I actually like women turning bad, it's so against what everyone thinks in real life, and it gives me pleasure when they kick some dude's ass, just to prove that we women really do know how to kick butt. Not that this fic is much about butt kicking, but rather ass fucking, *cough* anyway... (pardon my language *bow*)

[excerpt snipped]

Doyle's attitude at the end is good. He's uses his brain, in stead of his heart. That's kind of a Doyle trait to me. He might get upset, but when he's calmed down and started to think again he will see the right and wrong in a situation... and that's what he does in this fic.

And they lived happily ever after~! <3

Hope you had a good read. :)

I loved the plot - I thought it was really clever to have Bodie as a lone CI5 agent and Doyle as a 'civilian' being investigated; a sort of AU but not! I also loved the insights it gave us into the world of the undercover agent and how he interacts with the people he is investigating or even with minor characters. Bodie's angst at deceiving Doyle was very believable as was his rationalisation of all his actions. I thought they were mostly in character but... a few things really threw me and made me wonder if I'd accidentally strayed into an American AU. There is quite a lot made of a section of banter about Doyle's flatmate's party guests and the lads use the word 'mooching' in its American sense - totally different meaning in Britspeak so the whole conversation was 'wrong'. As a result the banter distanced me from the characters instead of bringing them to life. Then there was a description of overstuffed sofas as 40s style. UK 40s style was wartime utility, even for the rich - not much else was available. Both Bodie and Doyle would have grown up with that knowledge and the idea of overstuffed [equals] 40s wouldn't have crossed their minds, whether they were CI5, or artists, or whatever, so again I felt I was reading about foreigners with their names. This might seem trivial but both instances were quite near the beginning and threw me out of the characters (though not the story). That was a pity, because I liked the concept and quite a lot of the delivery!

I really did enjoy the story - and I like your writing style very much. I'm probably prone to 'nitpicking' about Americanisms because I'm the same age as MS and LC and watched the first airing of the show as a contemporary. I know exactly what you mean about research - I've used an American beta for TWW fics that would otherwise have had amazing errors, and I took risks and didn't bother for a fic set in the world of SG1 but centred on a European character. I have to say that it isn't usually obvious that you're American - you pull off the Brit tone/speech patterns quite successfully! It's just the occasional vocabulary that gives you away!! In this story, I think the 'mooching' being so near the beginning threw me, but most of the story was, as I said, great, and I particularly liked the exploration of the feelings of someone undercover who has to lie to people he likes. I saw somewhere that you'd turned 'pro' and wish you all the best with your publishing career!

One thing to remember, too, is that I wrote this back in the dark ages of Early Internet - getting quick access to British readers wasn't easy (and no one knew what a "beta reader" was then!). We were all focused on getting the stories out to readers, and while haste is not always a good idea, I do feel some forgiveness/overlooking is appropriate where fanfiction is concerned, where we are writing for love and the joy of sharing with others. I'm having fun with the pro novels - thank you!

I don't think [nitpicking about appropriate slang and Britpicking is] trivial. For me, slang and culture are a big deal when it comes to writing stories set in a specific country, and can even make or break a story.

In the case of the Pros, it's clearly British, so any non-British slang and culture would stand out like a sore thumb and ruin the show's 'universe', so to speak. (Unless, of course, it's an AU deliberately set in the US.) If the reader is well-versed in British slang and culture, they'll know something's off and they'll be jerked out of the story, and the work put into the story would be wasted. It's because of this that, while writing my own stories, I'd obsessively Google any suspicious slang to confirm whether it's American or British.

The writer of a highly acclaimed US show called The Wire once said, "If you write something that is so credible that the insider will stay with you, then the outsider will follow as well." One of the keys of writing a good, believable story!

Google didn't exist when I wrote Pros fanfiction, so I did the best I could with limited resources (or at least, limited access to *timely* resources). When I'm working on my pro fiction, I spend hundreds of hours doing research and of course, nowadays have instant access to online sources. It's a different world from when I first found fandom back in 1989.

I also view all fanfiction as something done for the love of it, and am much more lenient with errors than I would be with professionally published work. Yes, consistency lends credibility, I agree with that. As I said, one tries one's best, yet if a writer stuck only to what she was 100% certain of all the time, she'd probably write nothing but autobiography.

In fiction, one aims for creating characters and storylines that resonate with the reader, that connect. And that's what I've always tried to do within the confines of my own experience and knowledge.

Wow, I can't actually recall life without Google. *lol* Very understandable then, about the American slang and such. The internet has certainly increased access and wealth of information and knowledge on a global scale, hasn't it? I agree that fanfiction is something to be done out of love. Just to clarify, I wasn't saying that writers should only write what they know 100% for sure. I was just saying that credibility can make or break a story, to me. I know it might not be the case for somebody else and that's cool. We all have different ways of enjoying fandom and writing, and diversity in styles and perspective produce a nice variety of stories!

Alexandra is not only a very prolific writer, she is also very skilled at skirting the fine line between angst and agony. She likes to dissect the relationship between Bodie and Doyle and let them suffer, although not without reward - thankfully, they always end up together. There is no story of hers I cannot recommend, and I strongly suggest you read them all. Check out the Circuit Archive, and - enjoy.