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'Curtin is one of Ireland's best writers.'
Roddy Doyle
'Michael Curtin's first and very funny novel gives a good impression of being a free-wheeling, rumbustious shaggy-dog story while actually being a carefully structured and ordered work of considerable craftsmanship... the story grips and entertains until the last page.'
British Book News
The hero of this acerbic first novel is a young Irishman, Billy Whelan, who one lonely, dinnerless Christmas day in London, in that desert stretch of afternoon when the pubs are shut and Kilburn High Road dead as a tomb, huddles in his rented room and in desperation answers an ad in one of his collection of Screen Monthlies. He soon finds himself in a deep and confessional correspondence with a box number in New York and by the time we meet him next, in Limerick, married and with two small children, he is president of an organisation with American money in the bank but as yet no members but himself....
Curtin’s first novel, the partly autobiographical The Self-Made Men, was published in 1980 and describes the Irish emigrant experience in London with unflinching honesty and what one critic called “humorous indecency”.
Having attended Sexton Street Christian Brothers school, he worked in a cement plant. After five years he wanted to write and thought he could do better in London. An emigrant in the 1960s, he wrote a play which the Abbey Theatre rejected. Returning to Limerick, he gave up writing for a time until another writer – and Sexton Street old boy – David Hanly persuaded him to try again. This time David Marcus published Curtin’s short stories in the New Irish Writing slot in the Irish Press, and success in a Listowel Writers’ Week competition followed in 1972. Emboldened by this, Curtin began the long slog of trying to get a novel accepted which culminated in the 1980 publication of The Self-Made Men by leading London publisher André Deutsch.
