When Frank and Malachy Mc Court were just "a couple of bla guards" and short of cash they met Mike Houlihan who helped them out. Now Mike wants some of the loot which has rolled in from the best-selling Angela's Ashes and other books by the brothers.
Long before there was Angela and her ashes, there was A Couple of Blaguards - a play which Frank and Malachy used to perform around the bars of New York, based on the bad old days in Limerick. Frank was then a humble schoolteacher and Malachy an actor, bar owner and boulevardier.
In the early 1980s, they met Mike Houlihan, a Chicago actor and playwright, who raised $20,750 between himself and friends to stage the play in the Windy City.
In 1984, the McCourts signed a contract promising to pay Mr Houlihan and friends a percentage of royalties from the play and any "subsidiary" works for 15 years. Now it's payback time, says Mr Houlihan.
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal reports that Mr Houlihan has begun an action in a federal court in Chicago claiming 40 per cent of the profit from the brothers' memoirs for the investors in the Blaguards. This could be big money.
Frank has written Angela's Ashes which was also made into a movie and a follow-up called 'Tis. Malachy has written A Monk Swimming about his own adventures.
Thanks to the success of Angela, there was a revival of A Pair of Blaguards starring Malachy but no longer Frank.
The theatre critics noted the strong resemblances between the play and especially Angela's Ashes. The Washington Post critic said: "The stories and songs of Blaguards are the primal matter from which Monk and Angela and 'Tis were created."
The Baltimore Sun called Blaguards the "stage version" of Angela's Ashes and A Monk Swimming.
Frank McCourt, noting that a fair bit of money is involved from the four million sales of his memoir, says that Mr Houlihan "has hopped on America's favourite form of transport - the bandwagon".
Blaguards has been performed in at least 13 venues, including a production on a cruise ship in Sri Lanka.
Frank maintains that "the book's the book and the play's the play."
See what you get for doing down Limerick.