As with the previous 'Tintin' book, 'King Ottaker's Sceptre', this ninth book in the series feels very straightforward. Unlike that book, however, there's not a lot happening in between the lines that makes it more interesting, for very good reason indeed. Well, except for one detail. There's a new character of note introduced here and, while he's underdeveloped, he does liven up proceedings a great deal. But more about him later.

Before I can dive into the story, I must talk a little about the historical context in which it was born. A month after 'King Ottaker's Sceptre' was finished, Germany invaded Poland, thus triggering the Second World War, something that probably didn't surprise Hergé because that book served as an overt warning about Nazi aggression. Seven months later, Belgium fell to the Nazis too. Hergé had no home, because a German officer had taken it, and no home for his work either, as the paper he wrote for was shut down. Eventually, he took a job for 'Le Soir', the largest French language paper in Belgium, now under Nazi control, and that's where this book was serialised.

Obviously, there was no way that Hergé could continue to warn about Nazi aggression when a) he was effectively working for them now and b) it was pretty obvious by this point, so he returned to a pure adventure format without any political overtones. That's one reason why this feels a little light, but the other is that its story isn't light years away from 'Cigars of the Pharaoh', with Tintin on the trail of another drug smuggling ring, merely one that secretes their product inside cans of crab rather than cigars. The clues aren't wildly different, we end up underground behind a secret passage and it all feels rather familiar.

The thing is that I'm pretty sure Hergé knew that going in, because the conditions he was working under were hardly optimal, and so he played as safe as he could. Instead, he channelled his talent into honing the comedic side of the series and making that simple story flow as well as possible. It has to be said that the early pages are all careful slapstick. Page one features Snowy retrieving a can of crab from a rubbish pail and getting it stuck on his nose. Page two features Tintin with the inevitable double act of Thomson and Thompson, who are in fine form here. Page three is where we get down to business, though we soon learn the first two pages aren't wasted in the slightest.

The setup here begins with a tray of items retrieved from the body of a sailor found in the sea. The case Thomson and Thompson are working has to do with counterfeit coins, five of which form part of the sailor's belongings, but there's also a slice of label torn from a can of crab, a very particular can of crab that sparks Tintin's attention. The trail, which is notably patient this time out, leads to a merchant vessel called the 'Karaboudjan', where an assassination attempt on Tintin fails but an attempt to knock him out and tie him up in the hold succeeds admirably. Suddenly, he's at sea and in a lot of trouble.

Fortunately, his escape path is through the porthole of the drunken captain, who apparently has no idea that his treacherous first mate is smuggling opium in his hold, and suddenly we're in very familiar territory. That captain is Captain Haddock, who's almost as regular a sidekick for Tintin as his dog Snowy, and I've been waiting for his first appearance for some time. He's a real mess here, an alcoholic living inside a whisky bottle, and we soon learn what deprivation will do to him. If his actions don't cause enough trouble, usually inadvertently or by sheer accident, his craving for the drink will. Before long, he's setting a fire on a wooden rowboat to keep warm and seizing control of a plane in flight, prompting its quick demise, crashing it into the Sahara Desert.

What follows is neither particularly surprising nor particularly original, but it's energetic enough and it plays out very cleanly. If there's a down moment, Captain Haddock livens it up again, and a series of plot conveniences leads us to the inevitable conclusion. What's most surprising to me is that there are no fewer than four pages that are devoted to single panels, none of them needing words. They're beautifully drawn, of course, in the ligne claire style that Hergé pioneered, with a mastery of motion.

The first of them features our heroes sitting on an overturned rowboat after being strafed by the Moroccan plane that dominates the panel. We can almost hear the propeller while it rushes past us. The second is much calmer, Tintin and Captain Haddock sweating through the desert in search of water, their suffering palpable, even if Snowy's happy with a gigantic camel bone. The third is a chase scene through a Moroccan market and the fourth is a stunning shot of various characters in the same town, all framed through a characteristically shaped archway.

I've read that this book contains one of Hergé's own favourite panels from the entire series and it forms part of a wonderful section in which Captain Haddock appears to come into his own. He and Tintin are travelling through the desert, having elicited help and directions from an outpost of the French Foreign Legion, when they're waylaid by Arab raiders. During the ensuing gunfight, an Arab bullet smashes Captain Haddock's bottle and he rushes them in an insane revenge-fuelled charge, hurling those printable obscenities for which we know and love him. Troglodytes! Iconoclasts! And, of course, Bashi-bazouks! Of course, when they turn and run, it's not from him but the Legion that is approaching behind him, but it's a glorious scene for him nonetheless.

I'd love to love this more, but it's a flimsy story that Hergé has already told before. That it's told in such a clean manner goes some way to counter that, as do the circumstances under which he wrote it, but it remains a flimsy and familiar story full of plot conveniences. It's not the best 'Tintin' ever published, even though it was the first to be published in the U.S. and the first to be filmed, in stop motion animation in 1947. It's also one of the stories that formed the live action feature directed by Steven Spielberg in 2011.

The books I'm looking forward to most are a few years away, so I wonder if they all came after the defeat of the Nazis. However, the next few were written like this one, under the Nazis' thumb for the heavily overseen 'Le Soir'. Next up, 'The Shooting Star', serialised from 1941 to 1942 and first published in album form in 1942, the first of the series to see album publication in the well-known sixty-two page format that everything else then adopted, going forward or retroactively.~~ Hal C F Astell

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