★★★☆☆ This is how it started (not really)

The Big Kerplop!: The Original Adventure of the Mad Scientists' Club

Bertrand R. Brinley

The Big Kerplop! is nominally book 3 in Bertrand R. Brinley's Mad Scientists' Club series, but in fact, as indicated by the subtitle "The Original Adventure of the Mad Scientists' Club," it is chronologically the first book. The series is known mostly because of The Mad Scientists' Club, a book of stories about a group of boys in the fictional town of Mammoth Falls who use scientific and technical wizardry to solve problems and, also too, accomplish mischief. Scholastic reprinted it in paperback in 1965, and it became known to schoolkids, of whom I was one.

There were always some puzzles about The Mad Scientists' Club. What was the "conduct unbecoming a scientist" that got Harmon Muldoon kicked out of the club? And how did Colonel March become a friend of the club, and what was it he had done to earn their gratitude? These questions are answered in The Big Kerplop!. In an Introduction Bertrand Brinley's son Sheridan explains that Brinley, Sr began writing The Big Kerplop! in 1969, well after The Mad Scientists' Club's first publication in 1961 and even the Scholastic edition in 1965. Thus The Big Kerplop! is a prequel, and not the real origin story of The Mad Scientists' Club. The Big Kerplop! was finally published in 1974 by a publisher in financial difficulties, who only produced 1000 copies. This explains why I had never seen or heard of it until Purple House Press rescued the series from oblivion in 2010-2011.

The Big Kerplop! is not as good as The Mad Scientists' Club. The story is that a large object jettisoned from an Air Force bomber falls into Strawberry Lake while the boys who will eventually become the Mad Scientists' Club are fishing. The Air Force searches for it, but fails to find it. Henry Mulligan, the Club's scientific genius, locates and helps to retrieve the object.

The story suffers, in my opinion, from a serious flaw -- in order to make Henry look good, everyone else involved is an idiot. It passes belief that the Air Force Engineers hunting for the object could not have thought of the ideas that Henry did. I really dislike it when a plot depends on supposedly competent and smart people doing stupid things. (Star Trek used to do this FAR too often.) It's a cheap trick.

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