Topper

I first read the Topper books as a child in the 1960s, and was rather startled to come across them again in new editions in the 1980s, the ghosts of past years slyly rematerialised.

Both books do in fact deal with ghosts—this one was originally titled The Jovial Ghosts. Smith's ghosts are quite untraditional: he used the idea of ghostliness to supply him with a set of cheerfully immoral characters, who, being dead, have the convenient ability to dematerialise at will. Convenient for them, that is: rarely so for anyone who gets in their way.

They choose from time to time to inflict their company on an innocent banker with the unlikely name of Cosmo Topper, who, having the misfortune to be alive, can less easily escape the consequences of their frolics, although he seems well enough equipped with money to buy his way out of most trouble. Smith evidently detested American middle-class suburban society with a fierce loathing; he uses Topper's viewpoint to describe it and his intermittently substantial companions to tear it apart.

His books are most concisely described as escapist fantasy, and yet there's a peculiarly distinctive quality to the writing, and in places an engaging wistfulness, that raises them out of the ordinary. Expect nothing of the plot: it's merely an excuse for high jinks and bizarre observations. The characters, living as Smith did in the Prohibition era, display an insatiable thirst for alcohol and a distinctly casual attitude towards theft. The author clearly would have liked them to have sex whenever not incapacitated by alcohol, but writing in the 1920s he didn't dare go beyond a few kisses, so they seem incredibly chaste by modern standards.

I sympathise with Topper; I think there's something of him in many of us. This story is a rather childish fantasy, but it has an air of innocent alcoholic amiability, and I recommend it to anyone suffering from a repressed desire to be naughty. I think it pioneered a new interpretation of ghosts that other writers later found useful.