As I wrapped up my review of the third Tintin book, 'Tintin in America', I suggested that the series, in the form that fans tend to think of it, might begin with this fourth volume. In a number of ways it does, but it's not quite fully formed yet. 'Cigars of the Pharaoh' is a huge leap forward from its predecessors but it's still a little aimless as, when Hergé was serialising these stories for 'Le Petit Vingtième', he literally made them up as he went along, instalment by instalment. However, it's a lot more focused, a lot more mature and it introduces both a mystery for Tintin to solve and the logic by which he does that; even if it's still very much a collection of cliffhangers, some of which are far too convenient.

Tintin and his trusty dog Snowy are on a holiday cruise on the 'Isis' and it's stopping in Port Said in Egypt tomorrow. It immediately feels familiar to fans of the series, because the 'Isis' is populated with a host of regular characters appearing here for the first time (outside of unspeaking cameos in single panels in earlier books). There's Sophocles Sarcophagus, an absent-minded Egyptologist who serves as an overt precursor to Prof. Cuthbert Calculus. There's Rastapoupoulos, a villainous millionaire film director, who would return in future stories. And there's Thomson and Thompson, the inept almost identical British detectives who are particularly iconic regulars. Which is which? Well, Thomson has a subtle flair to his moustache. Otherwise, we'd never tell them apart.

It should be noted that Egypt was occupied by the British when this was written between 1932 and 1934, thus explaining their authority in this story, but not when it was first published in English in colour book form in 1971. Also, the Egyptian backdrop, obvious at least at the start of the story, is a direct result of Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, which sparked the Egyptian mania that consumed so many across the globe for decades.

The plot is triggered by Sarcophagus, substituting for Carter, because he has a papyrus that seems to identify the location of the lost tomb of Pharaoh Kih-Oskh ("kiosk", geddit?) outside Cairo. And it does. However, the icon he believes is the pharaoh's royal cipher turns out to be something wildly different, as Tintin realises when he notices the very same icon on the wrapper of a cigar dropped by the uncovered tomb. What's more, as the cover art highlights, once they find their way inside, a string of sarcophagi standing upright in a row contain a string of notable Egyptologists, who have presumably also found the hidden tomb only to be mummified for reasons as yet unknown. What's not obvious on the cover is that there are coffins ready and waiting for Tintin and Snowy too.

Now, the cliffhangers had already begun before this point, because Tintin has been framed as an international drug smuggler, Thomson and Thompson being tipped off to a cache of heroin hidden in his cabin, but he and Snowy merely climb out of the porthole in the hold after the 'Isis' docks in Port Said and they're free and clear. However, they escalate here, because the coffins are sent to the smuggling vessel 'Sereno', only to be thrown overboard when a coastguard shines its light on them. Cue the shark and a surely Hokusai-inspired giant wave, before the inevitable rescue.

It's on the rescue boat that the final recurring character appears; the Portuguese salesman Senhor Oliveira da Figueira, who can and does sell anything to anybody. He shows up in a number of later adventures, usually to help Tintin out of a jam, as he does here, albeit peripherally. While Hergé may have figured out some of the characters he wanted to be recurring, he hadn't figured out their final form yet. Talking of which, there's another character here who reminds of Captain Haddock but, once again, it isn't him. It seems that Tintin's most abiding sidekick, except Snowy of course, grew out of multiple incidental characters.

But back to the story, because this one has one, the mystery behind the symbol on the wrappers of Flor Fina cigars providing a focus that wasn't there in 'Tintin in the Congo' and 'Tintin in America'. That symbol, which incidentally forms the "O" in "Pharaoh" on the book cover, keeps showing up in strange places, even after the action shifts from the Egyptian to the Indian jungle for no apparent reason. Did Hergé like the idea of Tintin communicating with elephants, one of whom gives him a welcome shower, so much that he shifted location to allow it? Or was this another nod to the pulps, a location shift halfway being another standard plot device in 'Doc Savage' novels?

Beyond the central mystery, which Tintin doesn't investigate quite so much as he keeps stumbling into, we're still firmly in episodic territory and it's easy to see the boundaries around the sections Hergé was writing for each issue of 'Le Petit Vingtième'. He's captured in the desert and taken to a local sheik, Patrash Pasha, who unexpectedly turns out to be a fan, anachronistically hauling out a copy of 'Destination Moon' for Tintin to see. He rescues a woman from being whipped by a pair of ruffians, only to find that he's just interrupted Rastapoupoulos's latest Superscope-Magnavista production of 'Arabian Knights'. He arrives at a city, only to be enlisted in a war that Thomson and Thompson accidentally sparked. He can't catch a break!

There's even one section in which Tintin is sentenced to be executed as a spy, rescued, recaptured, shot dead and buried, under his enlistment alias of 'Ali-Bhai'. Even Snowy believes that he's dead, even camping out by his grave like Greyfriar's Bobby. Of course, it's all part of an elaborate rescue plan by Thomson and Thompson, who are so dead-set on arresting him for drug smuggling and gun running that they wouldn't dare allow someone else to execute him. Once again, as much as these often visual cliffhangers feel inspired by movie serials, so many of these plot devices feel inspired by pulp adventure fiction.

Of course, Tintin wins out in the end, but has to go through rather a lot to get there. He's not only hurled into the ocean in a coffin and apparently shot dead by a firing squad, he's also gassed into unconsciousness, kidnapped multiple times, lost in the desert without water, pressganged into an army, trapped in an asylum cell, abandoned on an ammunition-packed boat with a live grenade at his feet, caught in a tiger trap that hangs him upside down and, last but not least, knocked out in the underground lair of a hooded secret society. And all in sixty-four pages, including the cover!

All in all, it's a generally positive adventure, a serious step up from the previous two in many ways, but not yet quite what Tintin would become. The most important is that there's almost nothing in this one that feels inappropriate, just a peripheral African character on a boat being drawn in the same inappropriately caricaturist way as so many characters in 'Tintin in the Congo'. That's a very dated image, but it's arguably the only one, even though many other characters here are rooted in stereotype. Sure, the Maharaja of Gaipajama sounds like an awful name now, but that's not to suggest that he was an LGBTQ stereotype. "Gay" at this point merely meant "happy".

What I liked the most were the mystery that provided focus, the gorgeous art inside Pharaoh Kih-Oskh's tomb and the introduction of recognisable recurring characters, along with the meta nod to another 'Tintin' book. Oddly, it's an entirely anachronistic moment. This story was serialised in 'Le Petit Vingtième' from 1932 to 1934 in black and white, collated into book form in 1934 and then reworked in colour in 1955, but the English translation arrived as late 1971. 'Destination Moon', a quintessential 'Tintin' novel, was serialised between 1950 to 1953, collated in 1953 and translated in 1959. In other words, it was written almost two decades later but published in English a decade earlier. No wonder Tintin is so shocked to see that book here!

Next month, 'The Blue Lotus', which continues from this book but takes Tintin and Snowy to China at the time of the Japanese invasion. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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