The Mad Scientists Club is a series of two novels and two short story collections by Bertrand R. Brinley following a group of seven boys (Jeff, Henry, Charlie, Homer, Dinky, Freddy and Mortimer) in the sixties. The Mad Scientists Club are a group of amateur tinkerers who get involved in a variety of pranks, treasure hunts, Kid Detective stories, attempts to better the town with inventions and the like, with their first adventure being trying to find an unexploded bomb the air force accidentally dropped in the lake.
Tropes:
- Absent-Minded Professor: Occasionally Henry gets too distracted with an experiment to eat much.
- Academic Athlete: Jeff, Mortimer, Harmon, Homer, Charlie and Dinky are all pretty athletic, good at running, climbing and such (although Homer, Charlie and Dinky are among the less scientific members of the club).
- Affably Evil: The villains of The Big Chunk of Ice are fairly decent company when they're not trying to steal the diamond.
- All for Nothing: The bad guys in The Big Chunk of Ice spend the whole novel trying to retrieve a stolen diamond that had been lost in a (now melting) glacier and fallen into a plaster cast the Mad Scientist Club were making. At the end, it turns out that it was not the diamond, but rather a glass doorknob that a drunk tourist had yanked out of the motel and discarded in the glacier. As one of the villains puts it:Three generations of research, six months of planning, and a free-wheeling trip across the bloody ocean to boot. And all that kid had was a bloomin’ doorknob?
- Beleaguered Bureaucrat: Mayor Scragg, Chief Putney and Colonel Marsh all have their moments, particularly in The Big Kerplop (with Marsh getting the worst of it).Councilman Brown: The townsfolk are bangin’ him on the head, the newspapers are bangin’ him on the head, and now half the big shots in Washington are bangin’ him on the head. He’s been banged on the head so much I bet it hurts to get a haircut.
- Big Eater: Freddy, who has been known to have a sandwich stuffed in each of his shoes to eat in the event of an emergency.
- Butt-Monkey: Harmon and his gang in most of the stories they appear in (although in one or two they come out ahead and in another they have a truce with the gang).
- Character Tics: When Henry has a brainstorm, he tilts his stool back, looks at the rafters, and scratches his chin.
- Child Prodigy: Henry is the best Omnidisciplinary Scientist of the group and the best student at the school.
- Clashing Cousins: Freddy and Harmon relish the chances to insult or bump heads with each other.
- Clueless Deputy: Billy Dahr the local constable is an unimaginative, easily started guy.
- Communications Officer: Mortimer runs the club's ham radio.
- Crusty Caretaker: The club spends much of The Big Chunk of Ice staying at an Austrian castle, whose caretaker Axel is a Depraved Dwarf who has been barred from the local village and lives for little more than a chance to terrorize the visitors who come every decade or so (and the villagers, who he disturbs with constant organ music that echoes through the valley). He likes to play painful pranks, insult and threaten people, and spy on them in exchange for money. When the group leaves the castle, Axel even shoots at them with a crossbow and kicks boulders down at them.
- Did Not Think This Through: In The Big Chunk of Ice the Professor has them set off on a blimp journey across the ocean before realizing that as this is longer than he's ever flown it before, eventually he'll have to fall asleep. Fortunately, Jeff is able to learn how to do it quickly.
- Egg MacGuffin: One story has the gang finding a dinosaur egg (which Harmon tries to steal) and basking in the limelight. The ending is ambiguous as to whether the egg hatches or Harmon just fooled them into thinking it did as a prank.
- Embarrassing Last Name: Charlie’s.Ever since I first started telling these stories people have been wondering what my last name is, and I never tell anyone -for a very good reason. It’s Finckledinck.
- Fat and Skinny: Freddy and Dinky, who have the main Those Two Guys dynamic of the club, are it’s plumpest and slimmest members.
- Feuding Families: There are no recorded violent confrontations between them, but the Scragg and Sharples families have run against each other for every political office one of them was interested in for at least three generations and constantly undermine and insult each other.
- First-Person Peripheral Narrator: Charlie serves as the narrator and sixth member of the eponymous group, but we know little about him. The other members have easily discernible characteristics (Jeff is the pragmatic leader, Henry is the brilliant thinker, etc.), but it takes a close read of the series to even tease out the narrator's name.
- Flying Saucer: "The Flying Sorcerer" involves the club pranking the town by building a disc-shaped zeppelin, propelled by an air tank. They also replicated foo-fighters by gluing shopping bags to tins of camp stove fuel. It culminates in them dressing up as Little Green Men and running around on the roof of the fire hall.
- Friend on the Force: Colonel March of the local air base somewhat respects the gang and contributions they make to some activities like a search and rescue operation.
- Gadgeteer Genius: The group makes some decent (although generally low-tech) things like seismometers and a lake monster propped over a speedboat.
- Heroes Love Dogs: The gang get along great with Kaiser Bill, the local junkyard guard dog, to the point where he’s a Team Pet.
- Herr Doktor: Professor Stratavarius of Rumania, a local geology professor and friend of Henry's who is a bit of an Insufferable Genius.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: In one story the club is looking around the cemetery for treasure, keeping an eye out for Harmon. It takes them a while to find out that Harmon has been there the whole time disguised as one of a pair of civil war statues (having hidden the real one in the bushes nearby)
- Humble Hero: The kids at times, such as when Henry is thanked by some reporters for breaking the story in The Big Kerplop and he points out that a lot of credit belongs to the reporter who got one of the air force divers to talk about it in a bar.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: Combined with Not Me This Time. In The Big Chunk Of Ice when the Long List of aliases the bad guys have used (all of said aliases connected to various crimes) are recited "Mr. Smellow" protests that he's never used the name Jonathan Dimpfsnagel and doubts he ever will.
- Intrepid Reporter: Mr. Jenkins and Earl MacComber are the first reporters to take the gang seriously in The Big Kerplop and help them convince the Air Force to look for the bomb where they claim it is.
- The Leader: Jeff CrockerHe had a no nonsense way about him that makes everybody listen to him when he talks. He doesn’t ever throw his weight around, but whenever there’s a tight situation, people just naturally follow his directions.
- Lifesaving Misfortune: In "The Cool Caravan," Charlie's dad locking up his bike to punish his son for not doing chores causes the club to be late in responding to a burglar alarm at their secondary clubhouse (the eponymous cavern). Then, once Charlie arrives, there's a cave-in just before they can go inside, meaning Charlie's lateness saves their lives.
- Massive Numbered Siblings: The Pratt family has thirteen daughters.
- Master of Disguise: Both the four criminals and the three detectives chasing them in the novel The Big Chunk of Ice.
- Mayor Pain: Alonzo Scragg the town mayor tends to dislike the gang and their experiments. That being said, they like him a lot better than his opponent for Mayor, Abner Sharples.
- No Name Given: Plenty of adult characters (such as the sheriff's deputy who is assigned to watch the kids in "The Telltale Transmitter" and ends up helping them catch some bank robbers) are never named.
- Not Now, Kiddo: Happens to the Scientists sometimes, particularly when they claim to have found the bomb in The Big Kerplop (with that experience being a lesson to Colonel March to take them more seriously in the future).
- Official Couple: Homer and Harmon’s sister Daphne (in a Puppy Love kind of way).
- Old, Dark House: In "The Voice in the Chimney", the Scientists use various mechanical and electronic gimmicks to turn an old house on the outskirts of town into a fake "haunted house".
- Our Founder: The town has a big statute of Hannah Kimball, who some say founded the town but who is more famous for frightening off an Indian war party with just a scarecrow on a pole (which she kept waving around after it was shot with arrows) and a blunderbuss.
- Red Right Hand: Just about any mention of Melissa Punkett (girlfriend of Harmon's crony Stony Martin) mentions her stuck-out teeth.
- Remember the New Guy?: Joe Turner and Speedie Brown, members of Harmon’s gang who only appear in the last short story.
- Riddle for the Ages: At the end of "The Big Egg", Henry admits that the club will never know if the eponymous dinosaur egg really hatched or if a vengeful Harmon Muldoon stole the egg and faked its hatching (again, only successfully this time) in a Team Rocket Wins moment.
- Science Hero: The Mad Scientists Club in some stories, such as when they get a rainmaking device, are invited to visit a glacier and chart its melt, or make a seismometer which inadvertently detects people tunneling into a bank.
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: The first story has the gang making up a fake sea monster as a lark (and taking advantage of the tourists it attracts) while another has them fake some flying saucers and in a third they fake a house haunting (largely just to prank Harmon). In a fourth they start a flying man hoax using a dummy and a radio transmitter. For the most part, their plans start out just as them trying to see if they could make the required gadgets (or in one case to make an excuse for Dinky who said he was late getting home because he saw a sea monster). During the haunted house incident Chief Putney and Billy Dar try a hoax of their own by planning to scare Mayor Scragg out of the house to win a bet they made for a steak dinner.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the novel The Big Kerplop after an atom bomb is dropped in Strawberry Lake, Councilman Abner Sharples gathers his family and heads out of town for a “camping trip”.
- Sitcom Archnemesis: Harmon Muldoon, Freddy's cousin and a former member of the club, is always fighting the gang but often in childish and minor ways. Also Mayor Scragg and Abner Sharples poke at each other a lot.
- Spotting the Thread: Dinky is able to identify two of the disguised bad guys in The Big Chunk of Ice by how one of them has a certain mole on his ear and the other always wears alligator shoes with the laces poorly tied.
- Stealing the Credit: Chief Putney and Scragg try to do this often when the kids do something newsworthy (like stumbling across a bank robbery in "The Telltale Transmitter") and it often backfires on them.
- Stout Strength: Zeke Boniface, the junkyard owner and a friend of the gang is both plump and strong.
- Team Rocket Wins: More than half of the stories involve the Mad Scientists' Club getting into some competition or Battle of Wits with the rival club led by Harmon Muldoon, and completely outclassing him and his friends. However, twice Harmon manages to score a victory of one sort or another:
- In "The Cool Caravan" he is two steps ahead of them the whole time, outsmarts them, and lets the whole town know how he tricked them. Charlie describes the conclusion of this experience as the first time club leader Henry ever lost his temper.
- Harmon comes out of "The Big Chief Rainmaker" with his dignity intact, but only because his gang and the Mad Scientists' Club decide to cooperate over a money-making venture that time.
- Themed Aliases: The bad guys in the The Big Chunk of Ice introduce themselves with the aliases Smellow, Stunkard, Rank and Pugh (all of which reference body odor). They are jointly referred to as "Those Smellow fellows" by the Mad Scientists Club.
- Totally Radical: Angela in The Big Chunk of Ice likes to call everyone "man" and throw in other sixties slang.
- Wham Line: "The Secret of the Old Cannon" ends on a seemingly supernatural note when Henry offers Elmer Pridgeon a photo that his camera relay took and he assumes is of Elmer, only for Elmer to deny that he was present when the photo was taken while commenting that the image is "a durned good likeness of my daddy" (who also spent a lot of time lurking near the cannon and has been dead for many years).
- Whammy Bid: Freddy and Dinky use this to buy the husk of an old two-man submarine at an auction by each bidding lower numbers in order to confuse the crowd and make them doubt it.
- Who's on First?: In The Big Chunk of Ice the professor's two students are named Angela Angelino and Angelina Angelo.
