Fillums: A novel - Softcover

In 1942, with war raging in Europe, the playwright "Perry" Perry and his wife Babs tire of Dublin literary life and move to the small, quiet coastal town of Drane. Drane, however, is more than it seems. Its social whirl revolves around the amateur dramatic society--"The Standing Ovations"--and the film society run by Dermo Grace, owner of the Robin Hood Hotel, a man with a finger in every pie. Perry loves the "fillums," though the Hays Code still applies ("total nudity not permissible"), and good always triumphs over evil. That's the way Judge Garrity, with his mortal loathing for sins of the flesh, thinks it should be. But it's not like life in Drane. Up on the hill is the German Embassy, rumored to be playing strange games; down below lies the church, and an explosive book left by the censorious Canon Turmoyle; and the astonished Perry is soon entangled in a web of hypocrisy and scandal, affairs and adultery, love, tragedy, and death.

Hugh Leonard is the author of numerous plays, including The Au Pair Man and The Poker Session, the screenplay for the film Widow's Peak, and TV adaptations of Great Expectations, The Moonstone, Nicholas Nickleby, and Wuthering Heights. His novelization of his 4-part drama Parnell and the Englishwoman won the 1992 Sagittarius Award. He has published two volumes of autobiography, Home Before Night and Out After Dark, and was literary editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1976-77.