So sad but death held no fear for my writer pal Lee
MY heart sank when I saw I had a missed call from Lee Dunne shortly before his death was announced last Sunday.
We’d been close friends ever since he took me under his wing as a budding scribbler in my teens in 1991.
We talked regularly for over 25 years, but the calls had dried up due to his battle with Alzheimer’s.
He reached the grand old age of 86 – but his death still floored me.
Lee faced many other uphill battles in life; abject poverty as a kid in Dublin’s tenement slums, two failed marriages, and alcoholism.
But he overcame them and became a best-selling author – despite leaving school at 13.
He is best remembered for Goodbye to the Hill, which is probably the best novel about povertystricken Dublin circa 1930s-50s.
It deserves to be required reading on the Leaving Cert curriculum.
It was a measure of the man that he never blew his own trumpet.
But Lee, who was always the life and soul of the party, was actually a great singer and played the piano.
He often joked that he’d “seen and DUNNE it all”.
And the reformed hell-raiser wasn’t exaggerating.
He did drugs with Phil Lynott and once dropped a “handful of speed” before appearing on the Late Late Show.
Even sober, Lee got up to plenty of mischief.
He regularly dropped into the Taoiseach’s office to see Charlie Haughey… to talk about sex, he said!
They’d bonded after the FF leader read Lee’s series of soft porn novels with jokey titles like Midnight Cabbie and The Cabfather.
And I can reveal that Haughey and his lover Terry Keane had some of their secret rendezvous at Lee’s Co Wicklow home.
He said, “Charlie hinted the desk in the Taoiseach’s office had come in handy!”
Younger readers can be forgiven for not knowing Lee because his books are out of print.
But back in the 1970s you couldn’t switch on your TV without hearing about him. He even wrote 2,000 scripts for RTE radio.
There were pubs both here and in Manhattan named after his first novel and his alter-ego, Paddy Maguire.
Lee went to his grave with the dubious honour of being Ireland’s most banned author with seven novels – count ‘em! – blacklisted.
Even his film Paddy starring
Milo O’shea was censored in 1970. Lee, who was denounced from the pulpit for his risque novels, was so incensed when Paddy Maguire is Dead was banned that he handed out 100 copies on Grafton Street.
He’d hoped to get arrested but the Garda turned a blind eye.
Lee had a major comeback in 1990 with the adaptation of Goodbye to the Hill becoming Ireland’s longest running play, being staged for two years and nine months, at the Regency Hotel. His star had faded somewhat in the noughties, but I helped him grab the headlines again when my publishing company reprinted Paddy Maguire Is Dead.
He was teary-eyed to see his banned book finally on the shelves here – some 35 years later.
I had the privilege of publishing Lee’s final book in 2006 – his memoir My Middle Name is Lucky.
We weren’t embarrassed to tell each other, “I love you, pal” during our last conversation, which brings me some comfort now.
My deepest condolences to Lee’s wife Maura, his three children and grandchildren.
I’ll leave the last words to Lee.
He told me: “Death holds no terror for me since I see it as a natural part of life. The all important thing is not to die in a bad humour!”
He’d hoped to get arrested but the Garda turned a blind eye
He was teary eyed to see his banned book finally on shelves