I should preface this review by reiterating that there are multiple versions of 'Tintin' stories and a few of them vary considerably. Georges Remi, the Belgian writer and artist behind the famous pen name of Hergé, created the originals for serialisation in a newspaper supplement, 'Le Vingtième Siècle'. 'L'Île noire' was serialised from 1937 to 1938 and, like its peers, unfolded in black and white. It was published in book form quickly, in 1938, still in black and white but at full length.

By the forties, the 'Tintin' series was a huge success and Hergé was drawing new books in his ligne claire (clear line) style, so he and his team went back to the older books and redrew them to find a consistency with his latest work, colouring them in the process. Thus this book got a new edition in 1943, with all those changes, plus a reduction in size to the new format of sixty pages, which made the serialised stories far more streamlined but around half the length. This one originally ran to 124 pages.

But wait, as they say, there's more. Everything mentioned above was in the French language, but Tintin had become successful beyond French speaking countries. Many of the later books had been translated into English and published in the UK by Methuen to good sales, so they went back to do similar translations on older entries in the series, like this one. The timeframe here is the sixties.

In this particular instance, Methuen, the British publishers, had many concerns about the British setting, so drew up a long list of errors that needed correction. As Hergé was busy writing 'Flight 714 to Sydney' at the time, a much later 'Tintin' book, he sent an assistant, Bob de Moor, to the UK. Between Methuen's required corrections; de Moor's research, which prompted new backgrounds;

and other updates to make technology feel more current, meant that, when 'The Black Island' saw publication in English in 1966, it was substantially different from any previous version. It has been said that only the characters and the basic story were still Hergé's, the rest his studio's.

Entire essays could be written comparing the various versions and there's plenty of information about that online, but I'll dive into this 1966 English language version and review what I find, with acknowledgement of everything said above.

Rather oddly, given that it had been so ruthlessly updated in time, it still feels like a thriller from the thirties. As the heart of the story hadn't changed much, the influences are still clear and they naturally all stem that far back. Also rather oddly, given that this retains the standard sixty-page length for these books, it feels a little leisurely at points. Earlier books in the series crammed two or three times as much action into the same number of panels, but this breathes while it thrills, a worthy approach that matches the pastoral background for much of the book.

There are a few plot conveniences, starting with Tintin bumping into the story by accident on the very first page. He's taking Snowy for a walk in the countryside when he sees a plane come down, safely but with engine trouble. He checks it out and is promptly shot dead for his trouble, having realised it's an unregistered plane. Of course, he isn't really dead, or we wouldn't have a book or a series, so we quickly discover that the bullet only grazed a rib while sparking a determined Tintin to follow the story. We also discover Thomson and Thompson interviewing Tintin in hospital.

They, perhaps understandably, given the British focus, get a huge amount of time in this book and it's they who prompt him to catch the cross-channel ferry (there was no Channel Tunnel back then) to investigate where the very same plane crashed near Eastdown in Sussex the previous night. Of course, there are villains going the same way and Tintin keeps on bumping into them as the story progresses, sometimes allowing him to fortuitously keep on track but often by falling into worthy traps that they set for him, starting with one on the train to the ferry, which leaves him in custody of Thomson and Thompson for the crimes of assault and theft.

Of course, he makes it over to England anyway and the game is afoot. Even if the backgrounds are the work of staff members at Studios Hergé rather than Hergé himself, they're effective and give a pretty accurate depiction of rural England and Scotland at the time, even if it's a little too clean and pastoral. I'd rather see that than wildly inaccurate depictions that serve mostly to illustrate a lack of knowledge on the part of the writer. Maybe there was more of that before the errors that Methuen identified were fixed. I wonder how annoying they might have seemed to someone who was born under a decade later and only one county up from Sussex.

Another note to make here is that Snowy gets plenty to do and, while most of it's highly positive, the little dog saving Tintin's bacon more than once and keeping him on the right track, some of it is more negative, including a running joke about him getting drunk on Loch Lomond Whisky. The first instance of the former comes with a pair of bad guys, including the bearded Puschov, having Tintin jump off the White Cliffs of Dover at gunpoint. Snowy frees a nearby goat and antagonises it into chasing him through Puschov's legs, allowing Tintin to turn the tables. The latter begins as they head north to Scotland on a freight train, because there's a tiny leak in the whisky container and Snowy happens to be right underneath it.

Most of the book unfolds as cat and mouse stuff. Tintin catches up with the bad guys, but they get one over on him and vanish. Tintin escapes his predicament and gives chase. Rinse and repeat for however many pages. My favourite is a real cliffhanger of a scene, at the home of ringleader Dr. J. W. Müller, the Germans being as clearly bad in Hergé's mind as the Brits are clearly good, mostly due to the recent wars (remember, this is the 1966 version) but also because of British support for the independence of Belgium back in 1831. Tintin's fight with Müller has set the house on fire and, while he makes it into a separate room, a bullet that follows him shatters a jar of chloroform on a glass cabinet and so he's passed out cold in a burning building while the bad guys escape.

Of course, behind the cat and mouse intrigue, there's a mystery at the heart of the story and we discover that it's all about forged currency. Then, after the trail leads to the north, to the Scottish town of Kiltoch, located right on the North Sea, the mystery deepens. It's here that we make it to the Black Island of the title, the craggy rock in the front cover artwork with its ruined castle. It's a grand location for the finalé of a 'Tintin' story and the addition of a legendary beast on the island that blocks any of the locals from taking him over there makes it even better.

I liked 'The Black Island' for its single-minded focus and its patience. There's plenty of action here, between the traps and the cliffhangers and everything that goes down on the Black Island, but it feels like it unfolds without distraction and at a pace that's not too frantic. I'm less fond of some of the slapstick humour, though that's always fun when it affects Thomson & Thompson. There's a wonderful pair of scenes caused by Tintin who handcuffed them together during one of his escapes. It plays less effectively with the Eastdown fire brigade fumbling around like the Keystone Kops, even if they do eventually rescue Tintin from Müller's burning house.

Next month, Hergé returns to contemporary political commentary with 'King Ottaker's Scepter', a fictional take on the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. I'm expecting that to feel like a shift back to what Tintin did in 'The Blue Lotus' rather than the throwback feel I got from this one. Even in its 1966 version, this feels like a throwback to the thirties, reminding of thrillers like 'The Thirty-Nine Steps', published in 1915 but famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935; the latter being a clear influence on Hergé as he wrote 'The Black Island'. Of course, all this ties to the same time period, but one feels nostalgic and the other likely contemporary. Period is always a contextual thing in fiction. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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