Hachette India

Topper

Thorne Smith

Topper (aka The Jovial Ghosts) is Thorne Smith's most famous work about a law-abiding, respectable banker called Cosmo Topper, married to his rather staid wife Mary. It all begins when he decides to buy a second-hand car, only to find that the car is haunted by the ghosts of its previous owners–the reckless, feckless, frivolous couple who met their untimely demise when the car careened into an oak tree. Marion and George Kerby make it their mission to rescue Topper from the drab ""summer of suburban Sundays"" that is his life and take him into a series of madcap adventures. He is attracted to Marion, who at one point tries to kill him so that they can always be together.

Full of urbane wit and sophisticated repartee, Topper is a hilarious, ribald comedy that was made into a 1937 film starring Cary Grant as George Kerby, Constance Bennett as Marion Kerby, and Roland Young as Cosmo Topper. Topper has set the standard in American pop culture for such humour laced apparitions as those seen in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Heaven Can Wait, Beetlejuice and Bewitched.

Thorne Smith

James Thorne Smith, Jr. (27 March 1892–20 June 1934) was an American writer of humorous supernatural fantasy fiction under the byline Thorne Smith. He is best known today for the two Topper novels, comic fantasy fiction involving sex, much drinking, and ghosts. With racy illustrations, these sold millions of copies in the 1930s and were equally popular in paperbacks of the 1950s.

Smith was born in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a Navy commodore, and attended Dartmouth College. Following hungry years in Greenwich Village, working part-time as an advertising agent, Smith achieved meteoric success with the publication of Topper in 1926. He was an early resident of Free Acres, a social experimental community developed by Bolton Hall, according to the economic principles of Henry George, in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He died of a heart attack, in 1934, at the age of 42 while vacationing in Florida.