Dr. Brinkley’s Tower
The tower of the title is for radio broadcast, erected just over the Mexican border from Texas in 1931. The lives of the people of war-ravaged Corazon de la Fuente are never the same thereafter. At first the citizens are delighted… the tower’s owner is an American doctor, inventor of a miraculous “goat gland operation” that cures sexual impotence. The (ahem) erection brings work to everyone from handymen to the local brothel to the town beauty, recruited to become a radio seer. But soon the prosperity sours. The operation is a con job, the IRS is calling, and the broadcasts are transmitting through silverware, horses’ fencing, and the teeth braces of the town saint, with disastrous results. The deflowered town beauty’s true love decides to fight back, and a crew of righteous citizens joins him to bring the world back into balance again.
Full of imagination and wit, Dr. Brinkley’s Tower crackles with fast-paced adventure and incident. The colorful citizens of Corazon de la Fuente, from the local witch woman to the Spanish hacendero ruined by the revolution, never descend into stereotype, even when the plot tends towards satire.