Oh, there's a lot here crammed into just 64 pages and it's making this journey through the 'Tintin' series absolutely fascinating. These early stories—and this one first saw print in black and white in 1932, with the more sophisticated colour version appearing in 1945—were originally published in a conservative Belgian newspaper, 'Le Vingtième Siècle', or, to be more accurate, its supplement for children, 'Le Petit Vingtième. As such, the publisher's requirements were to push for themes like patriotism, Catholicism and strict morality; and Belgium at the time viewed the United States with a similar level of suspicion to the Soviet Union, albeit for different reasons.

Hergé was certainly a product of his time and place, a relic of a colonial era, but he also had some progressive views that he crept into his stories, even under the watch of his viciously conservative publishers, and that leads to some bizarre irony. This continues directly from 'Tintin in the Congo', with our journalist hero travelling to Chicago to take on Al Capone, who had been introduced as a villain in that prior book, but there are obvious parallels between the treatment of the Congolese by Belgian colonialists, which is seen as entirely appropriate, and the treatment of Red Indians, to use the terminology of the day, by white Americans, which is seen as ruthlessly exploitative. I have a burning need to see how the morality of this series progresses.

I should note that the third 'Asterix' and 'Tintin' books are both sequels to the second, but I never read either series in order when I was a kid. I'd pick up whichever titles I could find in charity shops or even new bookshops and devour them in whatever order I acquired them. I can't remember all the titles I read, but in each instance, if I read the second and third books, I would have done so at random and not realised how they were connected. Reading in order gives me that context too.

But to the story, because Hergé gets down to business here far quicker than I've done here in my review. We're in Chicago in 1931, which is run by gangsters. The police turn a blind eye to blatant crime in the very first panel and Al Capone is there in the second issuing orders regarding Tintin. The reporter busted his diamond racket in the Congo last time out and he doesn't want him to set foot in Chicago this time. Which, of course, he does in the third panel, alighting from a train in the Windy City and immediately being kidnapped. Talk about getting down to business!

Well, Hergé doesn't let up. He cuts his way loose from the steel shuttered taxi, elicits the help of a local cop, whose motorbike is then stolen by a gangster. We're on the second car chase, with Tintin riding the running boards like Doc Savage, by the start of page four. That chase sends him into the hospital, but he's released only to be kidnapped again and set up to be murdered in cold blood on the orders of the King of Chicago, Al Capone. He's saved by his trusty dog, Snowy, who drops a vase onto the gunman's head, knocking him out. Damn, this doesn't let up!

I ought to mention that Snowy is very much a character here again, as in 'Tintin in the Congo'. The dog even gets dialogue, which Tintin can clearly understand, something I don't remember from a slew of later books in the series. I wonder how long that will last. I should also add that riding the running boards of the taxi isn't the only scene here reminiscent of Doc Savage. There's one where a gangster attacks him with a sword cane and Tintin gets the drop on another, who's trying to get the drop on him, by manouevering his way from one 37th floor window to another by utilising the cracks between the stones. Now, this was originally published in 1932, one year before Doc Savage was created, but I'm reading the colour version from 1945, which reworked many details, so he's a likely influence at that point.

Certainly, many of the visuals are taken from Hollywood movies, right down to Tintin being tied to a railroad track as we often believe villains did to heroes in silent movie serials, even if it wasn't a commonplace trope. Hergé apparently did a lot of research and there are lists of what he read to put this story together, but it's clear that he also watched a lot of movies and gangsters were the biggest draws in 1932, a year after 'The Public Enemy' and 'Little Caesar' and the same year as the original 'Scarface'. Why wouldn't he dip into the pulps as well to flavour his trip through America?

And he certainly takes Tintin on a real journey not just through America physically but through a visualisation of everything he believed America to be, which is generally not particularly positive. The early scenes of madcap gangster action all take place in Chicago, where there are good cops to help him take down the bad guys but just as many bad cops in the pockets of the gangs and also an unending supply of gangsters masquerading as cops. Whenever we see a cop in this book, we're tasked with guessing which of those three categories they might happen to be. Of course, some of them are merely inept, such as the ones who ignore Tintin's message that he's captured and tied up Al Capone because they simply don't believe him.

With Tintin's focus shifted from Capone to a fictional rival gangster called Bobby Smiles, his quest to clean up the city moves him right out of it. He hears that Smiles has holed up in Redskin City, an awful introduction to his sympathetic take on Native Americans, and pursues him there. After he decks himself out in cowboy gear and finds himself a horse, he heads off to the gangster hideout, only to come a cropper by lassoing his own horse. That gives Smiles the opportunity to bump into a local tribe, the Blackfeet, whose land is a long way from Chicago in reality, and talk them into the idea that a dangerous paleface is coming their way.

Frankly, the Blackfeet aren't treated particularly sympathetically, given that they're gullible and quick to war, even if they're talked into it by a villainous white guy. Stereotypes also abound, but it has to be said that stereotypes abound throughout this book, not only while we're on reservation land. Rich white guys aren't treated any better and are arguably treated worse, starting with the scene when Tintin escapes from a Blackfoot cave when his gunpowder accidentally triggers an oil strike and, within ten minutes, Americans are in his face trying to buy the rights.

This is an absolutely blistering page, because, in a staggering ten panels, we progress from escape to a barrage of offers, ramping quickly up to a hundred grand, only for Tintin to point out that this isn't his land. It belongs to the Blackfoot Indians, at which point they give "Hiawatha" twenty-five bucks and half an hour to get out of the territory. An hour later, they're marched off at gunpoint. Two hours later, building begins. Three hours later, there are guards in front of the new bank that will serve the city that's springing up on what was formerly a reservation. That's brutal but it isn't remotely inaccurate, except for the ridiculous timeframes put there for comedic effect.

Of course, Tintin travels the nation so quickly that we can't help but think of the stereotypical US tourists who see the whole of Europe in a week. The way in which one visiting Belgian reporter is able to clean up Chicago in only sixty-four pages is reminiscent of the "white saviour" trope that's so widespread in American movies. Ironically, he doesn't bring good fortune to the non-whites, as the Blackfeet are forced off their land, but he does save the American whites, which is quite meta when you think about it, before receiving a parade in his honour and catching the boat home.

Did I mention Pedro Ramirez, the Mexican bandit who robs a bank and gets away by swapping his boots for Tintin's while the latter is sleeping? That gets our hero lynched with the inept townsfolk stringing up both Tintin and Snowy but failing every time. When the sheriff hears that Ramirez is now in custody and has confessed to this crime, he thinks about stopping the lynch mob but dives into a whisky bottle instead, ironically collapsing drunk right underneath a Volstead Act sign. The disdain for America is powerful.

There are obvious targets here. Hergé's America is ruthlessly capitalist, as apparent not merely through that oil exploitation scene but through the response to Tintin cleaning up Chicago. What follows, again instantly, are pitches from vaudeville, radio, Hollywood, advertisers, junk religions. Everyone wants him and all for money. There are digs at the mechanisation of people like Henry Ford, epitomised in the scenes at the Grynde cannery. They get scrap cars from automobile plants to convert into corned beef cans, but they also get old corned beef cans to send to auto producers to convert into cars. Perhaps there's a little hope for the future, now that Tintin has cleaned up a city and successfully battled its rampant corruption, but we don't hold out a lot of hope.

So that's the third of the initial 'Tintin' stories, if we count the first of them as 'Tintin in the Land of the Soviets', which I'll review much later at the point in the series at which it became available in book form. Each of them was tied to a location. Each of them is highly problematic to hindsight. Each of them focuses entirely on Tintin and Snowy, without any of the series regulars I remember, one brief glimpse of Thompson and Thompson in 'Tintin in the Congo' notwithstanding. The seeds are here, with a pair of extras reminding of Captain Haddock: a cop who cries "Suffering catfish!" and a railroad engineer who cries "Smouldering smokestacks!"

Really, though, I'm thinking that the true series might begin with the fourth book, 'Cigars of the Pharaoh', in which Tintin and Snowy travel to Egypt and series regulars start to appear. Let's find out next month! ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Hergé click here