Books like The Mad Scientists' Club

The "mad scientists" here are a lot more Scooby Doo than HG Wells. They're like, if the Scooby Doo villains were kids playing pranks rather than adults after cash. We'll cover this sheet in luminescent paint and pretend it's a ghost! We'll make a lake monster out of this raft and some stuff from the junkyard! They're small town boys trying to have fun, mostly, although there is a definite strand of mean-spiritedness that I didn't care for. Especially one story, where the boys put a mannequin in a jetpack atop a monument and pretend it is a person threatening suicide, I did not like at all. I'm sure the situation was not amusing to all the emergency services personnel who were called out. In several stories the kids waste the time of the police, fire department, even the air force and never seem to get in trouble, which I found implausible. It's not specified how old the boys are, but old enough to have girlfriends and stay out at night, so old enough to know better. I found it mildly entertaining, but probably not enough to look for more by this author. Although for this sort of boys' hijinks genre he is a better writer than average.