The Trunk in the Attic

Fanfiction
Title:	The Trunk in the Attic
Author(s):	Tavaran
Date(s):	2001
Length:
Genre(s):	slash, Bodie/Doyle
Fandom(s):	The Professionals
Relationship(s):	Bodie/Doyle
External Links:	online here
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The Trunk in the Attic is a Professionals story by Tavaran.

It was published in Priority A-3 #3.

Reactions and Reviews

A death story with a bit of a difference. The story flips back and forth between the future and the past. The future is 2044 and Doyle's great-nephew and his wife are clearing out Ray's house after his death. They discover a trunk of his things in the attic and bit by bit realise that Doyle was actually 'married', but not to a woman! He had kept his relationship with Bodie a secret from his family for his entire life.

We see the relationship between Bodie and Doyle developing and the important aspects are played out for us.

The flipping back and forth is done well, and the reader is not thrown out of the story by it.

We also discover that Bodie died when he had just turned 60 from a heart attack and that Ray had survived on his own (well he did apparently live with a woman called Sue for a couple of years) until he was 97ish.

I have to say that I personally dislike this kind of death story, I don't dislike death story's as a genre (I read and write them), but for me even though they had 20+ years together as lovers, the fact that Ray then spent nearly 40 alone without Bodie, bothered me far more than the, 'one dies and the other takes his own life or isn't careful enough on the job', stories. I suppose this story saddened me more than the other kinds of death story.

The very ending has Ray and Bodie re-meeting and Bodie telling his partner that he thought he would have to wait forever for him. We also 'see' Ray wandering around his house, watching his great-niece-in-law as she makes the discovery about his and Bodie's relationship.

Nonetheless, I thought it was well constructed, and Tavaran made it believable, even if it wasn't my 'cup of tea.'

Written in sections, the story is set partly in 2044 and partly in the 1980s. The sections written in the future concern two of Doyle's relatives finding out about his life after his death at an advanced age as they sort through his belongings. The sections set in the 1980s are flashbacks that illuminate aspects of Doyle's life that his possessions reveal.

The story starts well enough. Again, a bias alert: I have a partiality for third-party views of the characters. I generally find such stories rewarding on some level or another. In this story, watching the young couple discover Doyle's nude portraits of Bodie and other paraphernalia of the Lads' lives together is interesting, as though we are there being able to dig through and find out about their lives ourselves. The pay-off in this type of story--the moment when the third party discovers the Lads were a couple--is delayed here far beyond reason, I thought, but other readers might not feel the same.

For me, however, interest waned the moment Doyle's ghost spoke to his great-nephew's wife and any sense of reality went out the window. I also found as difficult to believe the great-nephew's excessive shock at discovering Doyle had a male lover fifty years earlier as the suggestion of less crime in 2044 than in CI5's time. The story is ultimately a peculiar hybrid that did nothing for me.