Professional Junkies

Zine
Title:	Professional Junkies
Publisher:	Laurie Keeper
Editor(s):	Laurie Keeper (eidtor), Jennifer Payne (co-editor)
Date(s):	1986
Series?:
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:
Fandom:	Professionals
Language:	English
External Links:
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Professional Junkies is a gen (vehemently so) 114-page Professionals anthology.

The art is by Cl. Crouch, Peggy Spalding, Eileen Roy and Diane Hawley.

Descriptions

From a submission request in Datazine #36: "Don't be fooled by the title, this is a zine for fans of the Professionals, Bodie and Doyle, who like their heroes 'straight.' Now accepting stories, artwork, and poetry. No same sex or porn please."

From an ad in Pop Stand Express #5: "This is a straight fanzines for devotees (my friends and I call ourselves 'junkies.' hence the name of the zine) of the British action series, The Professionals, sometimes referred to as the British Starsky & Hutch."

Contains a Controversial Essay

There was quite a bit of controversy regarding a primer written by the editor called A Treatise on The Professionals.

A fan [Fan A] wrote an impassioned letter to The Hatstand Express #11 and #12 complaining of how the character of Doyle and the actor were mistreated. Many fans responded to this letter, including one who wrote a 4-page open letter addressing the original fan who'd complained.

From the Editorial

This fanzine (late as it is) is dedicated to all those "Professional Junkies" out there who have burned the midnight oil watching flickering camera copies and reading mangled xeroxes.

This is a "straight" zine. For those of you who understand the term, I hope you won't be disappointed. For those of you who don't understand the term, I urge you to cherish your innocence; for the longer you stay in "Pros" fandom, the less likely you are to maintain your naivete.

Contents

• A Treatise on The Professionals by Laurie Keeper (This is later commented upon AT LENGTH in The Hatstand Express) (3)
• Running Scared by Laurie Keeper (9)
• Out of Touch by G.D. Burritt ("Bodie is trapped alone and injured in his car, out of sight, after skidding off a rain-slick back road. The trouble is, no one knows he's missing.") (36)
• Killing Machine by Laurie Keeper & Jennifer Payne ("After Doyle is savagely knifed by his mysterious new girlfriend, Bodie is left with the task of finding out who she is and why she tried to kill him.") (50)
• Longer Than Five Years by Valerie DeVries ("Bodie is taken hostage by old enemies out for revenge against, him, Doyle, and Cowley.") (67)
• A Professional Affair by Laurie Keeper (92)

Sample Interior

• 

  Cl. Crouch

• 

  Cl. Crouch

• 

  Cl. Crouch

• 

  Peggy Spalding

• 

  Diane Hawley

• 

  Diane Hawley

• 

  Diane Hawley

• 

  first page of the essay

Reactions and Reviews

If you're looking for a straight, hurt/comfort Professionals zine, you've come to the right place. In each and every story, someone is either shot, stabbed, beaten, or some combination thereof, and is very near death. Overall, the writing quality is fair, with the exception of the last story, where the dialogue sparkles. The art work by C.L. Crouch is good but suffers greatly from poor repro; overall, though, the artists do show promise.

In 'Running Scared,' by Laurie Keeper, Bodie's girlfriend is raped and shot through the heart, and Bodie becomes the prime suspect. There are some distracting glitches in this story. At one point, where Cowley was relating his war experience, I was quite confused until I realized that he-or, rather, the author-was using the term "Great War" to refer to World War II. That term is only used to describe World War I (Cowley would be at least eighty by the time of the series if he truly had served in the "Great War"). Also, the British haven't battled the French since Napoleon-they battled the Kaiser in World War I, and Hitler and Hirohito in World War II. And by the time of this story, Doyle already knew about Krivas. He didn't need to be told; only the reader needs to know, and this could have been handled in one, brief sentence.

Also, there is an allusion to a leak in CI-5, but there is no follow-through. (How did he get into the apartments without the security codes? How did he know the frequency of the R/T units? Andsoon....) This would have been an interesting angle to have developed and explored.

I liked the Tarot cards at the end.

"Out of Touch," by G.D. Burritt, was an okay story (Bodie's car crashes during a high speed chase, and he's at the bottom of a deep ravine, hurt and alone, his car radio isn't working, and he's left his R.T. unit home-again) that could have been much better with tighter editing. There wasn't enough tension, and I got confused concerning Bodie's injuries. Yes, I understand that he had a broken arm and a broken leg, but later we're told that the break was in the thigh area, which left me wondering how the leg would have worked its way out from where it had been pinned by the steering wheel.

In "Killing Machine," by Laurie Keeper, Ray Doyle is stabbed in the shower (and in the chest and abdomen) by his current lady love, and left for dead. The only comment I have here is that, having done a good deal of research on stab wounds (with the help of a board certified pathologist), I can assure you that Doyle would indeed have died after having pulled the knife out of his final wound. He would have bled to death. With work, though, this could have been a really good story.

By this time, weary of both Bodie and Doyle getting hurt, I stopped making notes on stories that just seemed like more of the same. I did like the premise of Valerie DeVries' "Longer Than Five Years,** but found some (not all, mind you) of the dialogue to be hokey at best.

I am certainly glad I persevered to the end and forced myself to read the Pros/UNCLE crossover, "A Professional Affair," by Laurie Keeper. When Laurie gets moving, she has a real flair for accurate, acerbic dialogue. This story was by far the best in the zine and a real treat; all parties were right on the money, charter-wise, and she blended the UNCLE and Professionals universes beautifully. My only regret was that it was over too soon. Laurie certainly saved the best for last!

I applaud Laurie's efforts to put together a straight Professionals zine. There aren't that many around, and writing for this show is not as easy as it looks. In fact, it's damned hard. I know-I've tried! A friend once told me that she felt Brian Clemens had done the fans a real disservice-his scripts were so well done, so intelligent, and so tight, he left little room for the fans to improve upon. He set really high standards and it's a real challenge for fan fiction writers to measure up. Laurie and her fellow writers here show definite promise and I wish them well in future endeavors. I would like to see them tackle a story where neither Bodie nor Doyle (nor even Cowley) gets hurt-just a straight, "good guys after the bad guys" scenario.

(P.S. Good use of Murphy through the zine-he's so cute. You don't know who Murphy is? Shame on you!)

I liked LONGER THAN FIVE YEARS and OUT OF TOUCH, particularly the latter—I thought those two came closest to the B&D we saw on the series, and their interactions with each other. RUNNING SCARED and KILLING MACHINE, though, both contained certain characterization "glitches" that bothered me quite a bit. Especially in RUNNING SCARED. At the end, when Bodie was talking with Ray in the hospital, and Bodie made that remark that it might've been those girls' "karma" to die the way they had! "We picked them up in a bar..." What, I wondered, did THAT have to do with anything??? I couldn't believe that ANY Bodie in fanfic, and certainly not the one we saw on the series, could be that callous? Also, instead of seeing any depth to Bodie at all in that story—instead of seeing him show any understandable guilt over the death of women who HAD been his girlfriends—we predictably see Ray doing his breast-beating act again, and ready to quit CI5 over it, and they weren't even his "birds?" Bodie didn't show any noticeable concern over his accidental shooting of Ray, either. I couldn't swallow any of that. In KILLING MACHINE, there were two instances of unbelievable insensitivity—first, from Murph, when Bodie was on Ray's bedroom floor with the nearly-dead Ray cradled in his arms, and tears streaming down his face - "Let him go, Bodie, he's all ready dead", or something to that effect. Later, at the end of the story, it got even worse when Bodie walked into Ray's hospital room, and Doyle had pulled the sheets up over himself in a shroud, scaring Bodie half to death in the process. I couldn't see THAT, either. I know, there was that scene in UNTOUCHABLES where Bodie pulled that "I'm dead! Fooled you" joke on Doyle, but the circumstances in this story were much different—Bodie's joke on the series had been a spur-of-the-moment type of thing, and in the zine story, Doyle really HAD nearly died earlier. He had to have known how upset Bodie had been over that. Can you see Doyle pulling a similar act at the end of DISCOVERED IN A GRAVEYARD? As a rule, while Doyle CAN pull "practical Jokes", his jokes usually aren't "sadistic." And certainly not anything like what we saw in KILLING MACHINE! It just occurred to me that, except for the "cross-over" story with UNCLE, the other four stories all ended with a hospital scene! It reminded me quite a bit of the old S&H "get-'em" zines. I DID enjoy the hurt/comfort in PJ, and I did think that the two stories I mentioned earlier were very good. RUNNING SCARED and KILLING MACHINE could've been much better if only the characterization had been stronger, and more realistic, and the author had known her characters better.