Topper Books in Order

The Topper books are the place where Thorne Smith's comic fantasy really locks into focus. The first novel, later also published as The Jovial Ghosts, takes a careful, respectable man and puts him in the path of two dead people who are much livelier than anyone around him. That basic contrast, order meeting delighted chaos, drives everything that follows.

Cosmo Topper is a banker, a commuter, and a man built for routine. He is married to Mary and has learned to live within narrow limits, even if those limits have left him duller and lonelier than he should be. Then he buys a secondhand car that once belonged to George and Marion Kerby, a reckless married couple killed in a crash. The Kerbys do not stay quietly dead, and once they take an interest in Topper, his calm life is finished.

One haunted car does a lot of damage.

George and Marion are not gloomy apparitions. They drink, flirt, laugh, meddle, and keep pushing Topper toward behavior that would have horrified him a week earlier. A big part of the series' fun is that the ghosts are not interested in revenge or justice. They want amusement, movement, and a little mischief. Topper, half-tempted and half-terrified, becomes their favorite project.

That push and pull is what gives the books shape. On one side is duty, propriety, and the safe little life Topper already knows. On the other is Marion especially, with all the danger, glamour, and recklessness she represents. Smith uses the supernatural as a way to crack open a respectable world and see what falls out. The stakes are personal, not world-ending. Will Topper loosen up, lose control, or discover that his old way of living was a kind of sleepwalking?

In Topper Takes a Trip, Smith sends the same basic energies to the French Riviera. The setting changes, but the ingredients stay wonderfully unstable: a living man who wants peace, ghosts who refuse to allow it, a marriage under pressure, and a vacation that turns into fresh confusion. The second book feels broader and more holiday-drunken, but it still rests on the same idea that invisible forces can expose what polite society tries to hide.

The tone is light, fast, and a little wicked. These are not horror stories. They are cocktail-soaked supernatural farces with an undercurrent of longing beneath the jokes. Mary is not simply there to be mocked, and Topper is not only a stuffed shirt. That extra touch of sympathy is part of why the books last. They are funny about boredom, but they also understand it.

The series had a long afterlife because the premise travels so easily. Topper became a hit film, Topper Takes a Trip followed it to the screen, and the characters later moved into radio and television. Even now, when people talk about cheerful ghosts disrupting the life of a staid adult, they are walking down a path Smith helped clear.