wit

Cosmo Topper is an average American bank executive on holiday in the French Riveria. Feckless, fun-loving and totally uncontrollable ghosts, George and Marion Kerby and friends – the tortuously crooked Colonel Scott and his companion, the disreputable Mrs. Hart – return to bring chaos and merriment into the life of mild-mannered, stuffy, and somewhat plump, Topper. One of Thorne Smith’s best-loved...

Ernest Brammah Smith is best-known for two series, the Max Carrados books about a blind detective, all of whose Perceptions are enormously enhanced, and a series of tales in which the Chinese Kai Lung tells stories – often to stave off some unpleasant fate, like Scheherazade. This collection of eight Kai Lung stories came out in 1940, two years before the author’s death. They show the same wit as the...