THE death of Mervyn Wall a few years ago received less attention than it deserved, since he was a central figure in the Dublin literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Fursey, a medieval Irish monk tormented by the devil, has a place in the Irish comic pantheon along with Brian O'Nolan's Pooka MacPhelimey, or James Stephens' two Philosophers in The Crock of Gold. The book first appeared in 1946 (it is dedicated, incidentally, to Denis Devlin, one of Wall's many gifted contemporaries in UCD) and Wall added a sequel, The Return of Fursey. Though the book is occasionally marred by the kind of garrulous whimsy which was a common fault of the period, it wears its age well and fully deserves resurrection. It might, incidentally, make an excellent film for TV, given an imaginative producer with flair.