I asked one of Dublin’s favourite scribblers how in God’s name he ended up writing two soft porn novels. Lee Dunne knows how to tell a good story and having lived the life akin to a hundred men, he has plenty to tell.

It was the early 60s and Lee was making his living in London as a cab driver. One day he was sitting in his cab waiting on a fare when he came across an ad in the New Statesman.

Maurice Girodias, a publisher with Olympia Press, was seeking submissions from risqué young writers and so that night when Lee went home, he sat down and began to write “for the crack”.
‘Hell is Filling Up’ was to be his first novel written under the pseudonym of Peter O’Neill. Lee laughs at the notion that people thought he wrote under a pseudonym to protect his moral character. Firstly, Lee is one of the lucky few who never cared what other people think; secondly, using a pseudonym was a practical move. It allowed him to write for money without having to worry about being ‘typecast’ as a particular type of writer. But most importantly, Lee was saving his name for his first Irish novel that had been cooking away in the back of his head.

‘Hell is Filling Up’ was written in ten short days and within six weeks the publisher of Olympia Press had sent Lee a contract guaranteeing an advance of $600 against the first five thousand copies of the novel.

The novel was printed in Paris, in English, and proved very popular with the American servicemen that were stationed there at the time. On the back of the first book’s success, Lee was asked to write a second one, guaranteeing the same deal as before.

Lee admits he would have written the books for nothing just so he could see his work in print.
His second novel had all the makings of a good ‘Carry On’ film. It was called ‘The Corpse Wore Grey’ and was set in a baronial mansion in Paris. The story centres round a suit of armour which is stinking out the house with the smell of strong cheese. The residents open the suit but instead of finding a piece of stale camembert inside, they find a dead body.

The novel was a success and once again Lee was asked to write a third book. This time, the publisher sent a chapter containing ‘not so soft’ porn as an example of what was wanted in the next publication.

On the day Lee started work on his third novel, he was minding his baby daughter, Sarah, while his wife was at work. Sarah started to cry and Lee left his typewriter to go and see to her.

Whilst feeding his ‘baby doll’, as he affectionately calls her, it dawned on him that he didn’t want his daughter reading what he had just written. After Lee put his baby daughter back down to sleep, he returned to his typewriter and tore up the ten pages he had just written.

Although Lee’s Parisian adventure ended that day, it cleared a path for him to write the book he had been saving his real name for. The book was called ‘Goodbye to the Hill’ and was published in London by Hutchinson– the paperback rights going to Arrow Books.

The US version was bought by Houghton Mifflin of New York and Boston– the paperback rights going to Ballantyne– and the book has scarcely been out of print down through the four decades of its life so far.

Lee wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood version called ‘Paddy’ which was banned in Ireland in 1970. In 1972 the Censorship Board banned the novel ‘Paddy Maguire is Dead’ and within the next few years Lee became Ireland’s most banned author. But that’s another story.

‘Goodbye to the Hill’ has recently been republished to celebrate its 40th birthday and is currently on sale in all good book shops along with Lee Dunne’s other great novels, ‘Barleycorn Blues’ and ‘Dancers of Fortune’.

Lee Dunne is pictured in the Mansion House with Lord Mayor Catherine Byrne.