Customer Reviews

Crackpots

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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Thorne Smith is my favorite author, so that let's you know where I am coming from. Not since the "Topper" series have I read anything that brought such torrents of laughter to my reading.

The first story in "Crackpots" was set in the Philippines. Having "been there and done that", I recalled the Jitneys, and a lovely world in which there is always a cacophany of sounds and sights.

The second story, "High Priestess", was a blend of New York's "Greenwich" Village, and Hollywood's "Swish Alps", Laurel Canyon.

FUNNY! FUNNY! FUNNY!

I found this book, Crackpots very amusing. How I enjoyed this fine novel. Jan Merlin really captures the nature of Filipino humor in yet another wonderful book. What a creative, intelligent author. Both stories are great reads.

In this day of sledgehammer comedy without wit or subtlety, how nice to read a book (two delightful stories) about amiable and harmless characters who are a little wacky. These stories are done with delicacy, yet with a fine insight into human nature. By showing the Deadly Sins in action, the author pokes fun at movies, religious cults, and the pompous and pretentious.

What Jan Merlin, a TV and movie character actor turned Soap Opera scripter and later novelist, has to offer this time around is two short novels (or long short stories), both set in places he knew first-hand. Both seem to take place in the 1970s, though some revision has disguised this. The last and best is set near Hollywood and involves an antique dealer with the most vicious, shrewish wife in all of literature. When, thanks to Bramwell Fletcher and Boris Karloff, the mummy of an ancient Egyptian princess who's smashingly lovely and hot to trot in her revived form attaches herself to him, and a weird rogue's gallery of neighbors, things get funny, indeed. The first story, set in the Philippines, suffers from being neither comically serious nor seriously comic, and giving us no viewpoint character. The high-points are the glimpses of the soft-porn Filipino movie industry. There shoulda been more!

I only read the first of the two long stories in the book, but it was a chore. There are no, read that as zero, sympathetic characters. The plot is straightforward adventure, and interesting as far as it goes, but the humor promised is not forthcoming. The view of the Filipino film industry has potential but is not developed.