After three separate two-part adventures, all of which worked very well to my mind, Hergé moved back to his older format of one book, one story, and it feels rushed. Then again, there's very little story, the vast majority of it being one long chase scene, Tintin and Captain Haddock (and Snowy) trying to catch up with Professor Calculus, who's been kidnapped by spies from one nation and lost to spies from another in counter efforts. Once they finally get hold of him, the story's done and all that's left is to go home to Marlinspike Hall.

To bulk this up a little, Hergé introduced a new character, Jolyon Wagg, an obnoxious salesman for the Rock Bottom Insurance Company. Whatever Haddock does and wherever he goes, he just can't seem to escape Wagg, who becomes a perpetual annoyance for him. These sections are funny but I wonder if Hergé went to the well a few too many times with this running gag, so the effect turns out somewhat mixed to my way of thinking. Hilariously, the only way to get rid of him turns out to be for Prof. Calculus to mishear that he has a contagious disease and promptly pass that on to this unwelcome guest.

Fortunately, there's a great setup for the story and the chase is often an enjoyable one. Haddock doesn't want any more adventures, just peace and quiet, but there's a sudden thunderstorm and he and Tintin stumble into a mystery when they escape the rain. Things explode at random—the windows, a Chinese vase, a Florentine mirror—and it doesn't seem to be the work of the storm. In the morning, they continue—the bathroom mirror, a glass of water, every single bottle of milk in the van outside—and there's no storm any more.

It takes Tintin to realise that these explosions stopped when Prof. Calculus left for a conference in Geneva on nuclear physics and, in fact, they only happened when he was outside in his laboratory. So they explore and stumble on intruders, one there in the lab and another unconscious outside. The only clue they acquire points to Geneva, so they head there and the chase is on. They miss the professor at the hotel—there's a wonderful panel with Tintin and Haddock ascending in one lift as Calculus descends in the next—and they miss him at the station, catching a train to Nyon.

And it's in Nyon, at the house of Prof. Alfredo Topolino—Topolino is the name of Mickey Mouse in Belgium—that they discover the key to the mystery. Calculus has invented an ultrasonic device of immense power but, fearing that it could be used as a weapon, wrote to Topolino, who has special expertise in the subject. The latter's servant, Boris, is Bordurian and he must have passed on this news to his masters back home, prompting a concerted effort by the Bordurian secret service to capture Calculus. And, if the Bordurians know about it, then so do the Sylvanians and so they're in on the chase too. And now we're in business.

We've met the Sylvanians and Bordurians before, so we know which are good guys and which bad. If memory serves, we first encountered them in 'King Ottakar's Sceptre', when Borduria were the warlike aggressors attempting to take over Syldavia. The inspiration was the Anschluss, which was Nazi Germany annexing Austria in March 1938, so there's real political meaning to it all. We'd be blind not to see Borduria as Nazi Germany, though Syldavia could well be any European nation. That was 1939 though, before the war. The Nazis were an imminent threat.

Of course, we'd returned to Syldavia in 'Destination Moon', because they were doing well enough after the war to start a space programme. Prof. Calculus was working for them when he built the rocketship that takes our heroes to the Moon. I presume the bad guys in that and its second half, 'Explorers on the Moon', could be Bordurians but I'm not sure that's actually called out explicitly. The Nazis had been defeated by that point so their threat was over and we could move on to new bad guys. It's odd to see Borduria here again in 1956, long after the war, the story serialised from late 1954 in 'Tintin' magazine.

Of course, the tone is Cold War. Spy stories and movies were all the rage and it isn't surprising for that to work into a 'Tintin' story. I'm all for it. The series was built for intrigue. Even if it all works out to be window dressing, it's highly effective here. What isn't are the names, which are notably cheesy. The glorious ruler of Borduria is now Marshal Kûrvi-Tasch who has a curvy tache indeed. A trip to Szohôd in Borduria on Calculus trail lands Tintin and Haddock two guards masquerading as interpreters, Krônick and Klûmsi, who take them to the hotel Sznôrr. All of that is frustratingly cheap.

And so this ended up as a mixed bag for me. The intrigue is great and the chase effective. It's set up well too, a great panel while Tintin and Haddock flee inside Marlinspike Hall from the storm at the beginning showing not merely that there's someone watching them but that there's someone watching him too. I can't say I didn't enjoy Jolyon Wagg ruthlessly stealing the limelight and never willing to give it up but the running gag got old. So did another about women ringing Marlinspike to talk to Cutts the Butcher. The numbers are presumably close and it prompts one funny moment as Haddock answers the phone in a storm, but this running gag gets old too.

Frankly, while I enjoyed this, I'm missing the two-part story approach already. Hergé had followed it three times in a row, meaning six books, and they'd taken him from 1942 to 1953. Those stories knew how to breathe, the story in one book neatly setting up another in the next book. This feels rushed and unsubstantial in comparison with a need for the running gags to punctuate the chase. Now, having said that, I know that Hergé's own favourite, 'Tintin in Tibet', isn't far away and many fans have called out later books as theirs, so maybe this is a slight misstep as he adjusted. Maybe I will be happier next month with 'The Red Sea Sharks'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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