Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Thorne in the Flesh

 

Rhona Petrie (1922-2010) was the pen name of British author Eileen-Marie Duell Buchanan, who also wrote under the name Clare Curzon. She didn't start her literary career until the 1960s, with the publication of Death in Deakins Wood, the first installment in a series featuring Police Inspector Marcus Maclurg. She went on to publish over forty novels, and the most successful was her series focusing on Detective Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley Serious Crime Squad, some 24 books in all.

Her numerous books weren't just throw-away quickies, either. Guilty Knowledge (1999), the first book in the Stakerly Series set in 1900s London and featuring Lucy Sedgewick, was short-listed for the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger in 2000. It actually won an award in that same year, the Herodotus Award for Best First International Historical Mystery.

Perhaps it was the author's studies in French and psychology at King's College, London, that culminated in the publication of Thorne in the Flesh in 1971, a standalone suspense/political thriller novel. Just about every page is heavily laced with the philosophical musings of the protagonist, and there's a strong Francophile-oriented angle, as well.

The titular protagonist of the book, Ellis Thorne, is a dedicated London schoolmaster living a fairly quiet life renting a single room whose entrance is crammed between Express Dairy and the launderette. One day, out of the blue the police arrive with word that a great uncle whom Thorne knows only by name, Sylveste Aury, has been seriously injured in a car crash that at first glance appears to be an accident. Thorne makes a promise to his dying relative who tells him "No accident—all yours now—you'll find—in the file—you'll take it over?"

As Thorne digs deeper into his great-uncle's business, he's pulled down into a seamy world of strippers, a squatter's siege, 1960s counterculture and anarchism, muggings, and the high-profile kidnapping of a politician that sets off riots. With pressure on all sides from thugs, the police and the intelligence service, he soon decides he's had enough and almost turns his back on the whole lot. But he can't seem to tear himself away from Tina, one of the night-club employees, and the responsibility he feels for the unlikely-named Katte Mandu, an African girl Aury was taking care of, as well as Millie, the oversized English sheepdog that came with Thorne's apartment.

The writing and subject matter is still relevent today, and Petrie manages to weave some fanciful turns of phrase and wit along with the dark atmosphere:

His mind, he'd prided himself, was a tidy one. Now it was ransacked, its contents churned and pawed over like a room that had been pillaged. He had thought he'd known what it contained and where everything was kept. Now he wasn't sure. Hidden prejudices were brought to light, the junk stuffed away behind furniture.

and

A girl took off her clothes and danced, and the audience watched serpents of light wriggle and coil over her limbs, saw stardust powder the upward curves of her pagoda body.  But from where Thorne had sat, without neophiliac needs, he had seen the mechanics, recognized not spangles but sweating flesh, seen on the nakedness the sad little marks of tight elastic, pubic stubble and bitten nails. Things that on a loved body would be endearing, but here were pathetic.

and

. . . before them the muffled sounds of people boxed up inside the building—water running, a child's fretful crying, voices raised in angry dipute, a woman suddenly screaming abuse from only a few yards distant; the sound of fist on flesh and a moment's silence, then moaning and sobs of something subhuman, pleading and hating and desperately needing.

Marie Buchanan's last novel, Devil in the Detail (part of the Yeadings series), was published in 2010, but the author still isn't all that widely known, especially in the U.S. Fortunately, several of her books are available in paperback and hardcover, worth seeking out for a first, or second, look.