The Mad Scientists' Club

The Mad Scientists' Club is a series of four books written for children by Bertrand R. Brinley (1917 – 1994) and illustrated by Charles Geer.

The title of The Big Kerplop was supposed to be The Big Kerplop!, but the original publisher, MacRae Smith Company, dropped the exclamation mark, which has now been restored. Even though it was written 14 years after the "The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake", chronologically it is the first story in the series, telling how the Mad Scientists' Club came into being and the full story behind their long-standing animosity with Harmon Muldoon.

During the course of the books, the boys often use technology (such as ham radios) and science to pull off harebrained schemes. For example, in "The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake," they build a fake sea monster out of chicken wire mounted to a canoe, and row it out on Strawberry Lake. When it gets too dangerous to take the boat out on the lake in person, because hunters are preparing to shoot it with an elephant gun, they rig a remote control system to operate it at a distance.

The Mad Scientists' Club is an Explorer Scout organization, something that is mentioned occasionally in passing, but generally does not drive the stories.

Living in the fictional small town of Mammoth Falls, the members of the Mad Scientists' Club are:

Dinky Poore is the smallest and most sarcastic of the Mad Scientists; this is sometimes relevant to the stories, as in "The Great Gas Bag Race", in which the boys prepare to compete in a hot-air balloon race without deciding which two Mad Scientists will have the honor of crewing the balloon; since Dinky weighs less than anyone else in the club, he is the only one who is certain of being chosen.

In contrast to the supernatural, mystical, romantic, or preachy moral elements usually found in children's books, The Mad Scientists' Club books build their plot devices around science, mechanical inclination, a do it yourself ethic, and some good-natured pranks, making the boys in these books sort of junior precursors to MacGyver, or a fictional counterpart to the real-life Rocket Boys. The early stories and the first book in the series were published in the wake of the impact of Sputnik 1 and the Space Race and reflect the thinking of that period. The first book even includes a plug for joining the United States Air Force in the last story, "Night Rescue". There are two odd, inexplicable exceptions to the usually science-based, non-supernatural nature of the stories. They are "The Secret of the Old Cannon" in the first book — at the end of the story it is hinted the boys unwittingly photographed a ghost — and the Indian Sun Dance from "Big Chief Rainmaker" in the second book. The level of technology found in these books is, of course, "low-tech" by modern standards, with no commercial home computers or miniaturized electronics, but the technology depicted in the books — home-built computers, scuba, ham radio, helicopters, remotely radio-controlled devices — was, at the time, typical of the cutting edge of technology during the post-World War II, pre-Internet era. The science is accurate; Dinky provides actual Houdini escapology in "The Telltale Transmitter" that readers would do well to remember if they ever found themselves tied up.

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