Customer Reviews

The Big Kerplop; A Mad Scientists' Club Adventure

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I'm so glad this is finally available.

I fondly remembered the Mad Scientist's Club stories which a teacher read to our fifth grade class in the early seventies. I soon bought the books for myself and read them several times over the years.

When my daughter was seven (just a couple of years ago) I read them to her and she (more accurately we) enjoyed them thoroughly. While browsing eBay one day I discovered there existed a "prequel" novel - The Big Kerplop - which was published in a very limited edition (1000 copies if I remember right).

I eventually obtained one at the "bargain" price of $$$ - by far the lowest price I found in 6 months of searching. I gave it to my daughter for Christmas (it's well cared for and stored safely) and read it to her over the next week.

Amazingly enough it surpasses the quality of the short stories and I felt it was worth every penny.

Now that it's available at one tenth what I paid for it I recommend it unreservedly. It's self contained and doesn't require familiarity with the other stories but I still recommend you read The Mad Scientist's Club and The New Adventures of The Mad Scientist's Club first so you can really savor The Big Kerplop. All high quality youth literature.

The magic of Brinley's Mad Scientists' Club is its combination of adolescent fantasy with the real world. Where else can a bunch of brainy small town kids become heroes not by stepping through a portal to some fantasy world but by knowing more about our world's natural laws than the adults who surround them? This novel works best as a prequel to the collections of tales found in Brinley's first two books, which are childhood favorites of mine. However, the story stands on its own, and its scope eclipses those earlier short stories. The Air Force has lost an atomic bomb in the town's Strawberry Lake, and only the Mad Scientists' ingenuity can save the day! At first this gang of adolescents can't get the grownups to listen, but they soon prove their worth. Likewise, I recommend that you give them a chance. They won't let you down.

This is a great book, just like all their other stories. I like the way when they have a problem they just think up a way to solve it, and then they think up a way to do that. And they're not afraid of the army or anybody, they just do what they have to do. I know this book was written a long time ago, but they sound just like guys I know. (only smarter) I wish there were more books like this out there because I would sure read them too! The mad scientists club is great!

In this book, Henry and the other young mad scientists help the military locate a nuclear missile that has landed in the local lake. It is the third book in the series. It has a much more complex storyline than any of the the other Mad Scientists stories and makes the guys question the purpose of their endeavours. In an earlier adventure, we are given to believe that the military would be the best place for the young scientists to grow up, but in this story we see that the military has serious flaws. This is radical for a story from this era, especially from an author who was part of the military-industrial complex himself.

Welcome to Mammonth Falls, where you can get a great hambuger for thirty-five cents and go fishing at Strawberry Lake. If you don't mind the Air Force scaring the fish away by dropping stuff into the lake. Like an atomic bomb!
Henry Mulligan and the Mad Scientist Club want to help the Air Force recover the object, but the government does not want their help. In fact, they don't want to even talk about it at first.
But the Air Force has to do something fast, because the longer the bomb is in the lake the worse things become. Reporters, angry housewives and pressure from higher ups are starting to really make things hot for Colonel March.
Will the Air Force turn to the Mad Scientist Club or will the Club have to handle the problem of the bomb on their own?
A great adventure and really allows the characters to use their brains AND still stay in character. This adventure shows you how the club was formed!

I searched for this book for years. I loved and still love both the original and The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, and so I scoured bookstores to try to find this elusive prequel (only a thousand copies printed in 1974). Then came this reprint, and I ordered it and was promptly disappointed.

There's only three chapters that have anything like the earlier works - the boys out in a boat on a lake at night, evading the police in a search boat. Good stuff. But the rest of the novel is all about the town councilors and police chief and reporters and Air Force officers. They just go on and on about nothing, so that you start flipping ahead to get back to the boys.

If you were to cut all that out, you'd get a story the length of one of the originals, but even then this story doesn't work because the boys don't actually have much of a hand in the outcome of the story. And it bogs down, as when, at the end, the general goes off to oversee the diving, and the boys are taken to a hotel restaurant by a reporter. We're then given two full pages describing the hotel, and then another page of talking about food, and finally they get back to the fact that they need a way to get to the lake. Even then, when they get there, everything goes basically well, and they get celebrated, so that there's no surprises or action or interesting climax at all.

In short, as much as I'd love to praise this book, you might find it best to stick with the originals.

If you loved Bertrand R. Brinley's two collections of stories: The Mad Scientists' Club and The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club or the final novel The Big Chunk of Ice: The Last Known Adventure of the Mad Scientists' Club, then you'll also love "The Big Kerplop!" The boys return in the first novel-length adventure of the Mad Scientists of Mammoth Falls, which is in fact a prequel that explains how the club was formed and how founding member Harmon Muldoon got expelled, becoming their nemesis in the short stories.

Jeff Crocker, Charlie Finckledinck, and Harmon Muldoon are fishing in the fog on Strawberry Lake when an Air Force exercise goes wrong resulting in something rather large landing near the boys with a loud Kerplop! Thinking that the Air Force might like to have whatever it was back, the boys attempt to calculate their position using basic scientific principles. Their thinking turns out to be correct when the "something" is revealed to be a hydrogen bomb! However, when the Air Force fails to find the bomb where the boys calculated their position to be (or anywhere else for that matter), Jeff, Charlie, and Harmon take matters into their own hands, gathering together the future members of the Mad Scientists' Club both in order to prove that they were right and to find the missing hydrogen bomb. Hi-jinks ensue.

As a boy, I was terribly disappointed by "The Big Kerplop!" that I had waited six long years for because I had assumed based on the brief published descriptions of the upcoming book, originally titled "The Sunken Village", that we would finally see the restored midget submarine in action. Instead it turned out to be a prequel, and the midget submarine was never used. Rereading it now, I can better appreciate what turned out to be a very fine novel, a worthy companion to the previous books, that revealed a lot more about the characters than the short stories had disclosed. However, I can also more clearly see the chronological problems introduced by this prequel, specifically, the logic problem arising from making the boys such huge heroes at their club's founding that their subsequent anonymity and treatment like a bunch of normal kids makes no sense. In addition Harmon Muldoon is portrayed as such a total jerk that the reader is left wondering how Jeff and Charlie could stand him long enough to be friends with him at the beginning of the novel.

Note: the Purple House reprint of The Big Kerplop!: The Original Adventure of the Mad Scientists' Club is worth picking up even if you own the extremely rare first edition of The Big Kerplop; A Mad Scientists' Club Adventure because the text is based on the original manuscript, restoring a number of passages that had been cut for space reasons. It also includes an introduction written by Bertrand's son Sheridan. First time readers would be well advised to read this novel after reading the short stories in chronological order; for subsequent rereadings this novel can be placed first where it belongs chronologically.

Purple House Press is reissuing The Big Kerplop! in 2003. At last the elusive third book in the Mad Scientists' Club series will be available to everyone who wants to read it!

I'm as big a fan of "The Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club" and "The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club" as anyone is. I loved those books to death as a kid, and even today, as I re-read the first two books, they're still as funny and clever as I remember-- my memories are not clouded by nostalgia. I became a scientist (for real) because of those two books. However, "The Big Ker-Plop", despite a promising beginning, just isn't as good.

It starts out great: it's wonderful to be with the boys again as they go fishing on a foggy morning in Strawberry Lake, and somethign BIG falls from the sky and lands somewhere in the water... To be back on Strawberry Lake again with these brainy, energetic boys is terrific, and right away there's a mystery to solve. The boys enlist the aid of Henry Mulligan to find the object that fell in the lake, and how they do it-- using some trigonometry and a magnetometer-- is described with scientific accuracy, believeable, clever and entertaining. It's such a relief to have a plot where problems are solved by something other than Harry Potter's wand.

But after the boys tell the Air Force where they found the object, the plot seriously bogs down. For all intents and purposes, the boys aren't really involved in the plot thereafter, except as observers and (maybe) engineers. The boys just invent solutions to problems-- and they are clever solutions, described with scientific accuracy. But the Air Force does all the "action", and the boys just watch them through a telescope as the adults try to retrieve the lost atomic bomb. I understand that it's realistic that the Air Force would go after a lost atomic bomb themselves, and would not let any civilians anywhere near the site-- yes, realistic, but it makes for a boring story. It's not fun anymore when the adults do all the work.

The adults are an important part of the story, and the adult characters are all paper-thin cliches (the good-hearted Air Force colonel, the hard-bitten reporter, the fat news photographer), uninteresting. Brinley was a brilliant plotter, able to write plausible real-world stories with clever twists-- but he had a major defect as a writer: he loved to write "clever" dialogue full of ripostes and "witty" put-downs, which in fact were never clever or funny. The adults do a LOT of talking in this book-- whole chapters consist of their dialogue-- and when the idiot mayor of Mammoth Falls is engaging in "clever" repartee with the barber or some other adult, the witticisms are so unfunny, it just makes me wince.

The Mad Scientists Club series of stories is great for sixth through high school. It uses humor, pranks, and
imagination to portray developing minds, and interests them in science, and good works through a knowledge
of science and scouting.