After a break from routine with the anomalous but stellar 'Tintin in Tibet', Hergé set his twenty-first 'Tintin' adventure as close to home as possible, almost the entire book unfolding at Captain Haddock's mansion, Marlinspike Hall. Instead of the leads travelling to some exotic location for a new adventure, he had supporting characters travel to them. Professor Calculus is already there, of course, but Jolyon Wagg shows up, Thompson and Thomson show up and, most frustratingly to the captain, Bianca Castafiore, the Milanese Nightingale, shows up.

She breezes in like she owns the place and practically takes over Haddock's life. She arrives with a maid and an accompanist, Irma and Igor Wagner respectively; has a grand piano delivered so that the latter can practice; and, after claiming to be there incognito to escape the world for a couple of weeks, promptly invites reporters and then an entire television crew to interview her. Through a misunderstanding by the profoundly deaf Professor Calculus, they promptly report that Bianca Castafiore will be settling down in marriage to the old sea dog. By comparison, the Romany camp he invites to stay on his pasture, in preference to the local rubbish tip, aren't any trouble at all.

As the title suggests, this isn't about the Milanese Nightingale so much as it's about her jewels, a valuable collection of them that we soon discover, when Jolyon Wagg appears like a bloodhound on the trail, aren't even insured. We're set up to believe that they'll be stolen at some point, and her emerald, a gift from the Maharajah of Gopal, eventually is. Of course, the authorities believe the gypsies to be responsible, just because they're gypsies, but they're one of a whole barrage of red herrings. There are so many red herrings here that I'm surprised Hergé didn't title the book 'The Red Herring', to spark discussion about which red herring is THE red herring.

Apparently, 'The Castafiore Emerald' didn't do as well commercially as previous albums, but I had an absolute blast with it. It's almost the antithesis of a traditional 'Tintin' story. He doesn't have to go to the mystery, because the mystery comes to him and it proliferates. There are mysteries everywhere in this book, albeit generally tiny ones, and so many clues that we're almost dazzled by them. However, the most obvious villain is a paparazzo from 'Tempo di Roma' who sneaks in to steal a photograph of Bianca Castafiore during her television interview. It's all a far cry from the usual high stakes intrigue.

Instead, it focuses on character and deflection. I felt more for Captain Haddock in this book than in any previous volume. All he's wanted throughout the series is to be able to sit back and relax in his own place. Now he finally gets a book where he doesn't leave the grounds of Marlinspike Hall, it's packed with chaos and frustration. There's even a point where he utterly fails to drink a glass of whisky because he's emptied it by accident in an impromptu gesture of exasperation. To make things worse, the fourth step on his grand staircase is broken and he sprains his ankle tripping on it. To be fair, almost everyone in the book trips on it at some point, often more than once.

Professor Calculus gets plenty to do here too, even though he's so deaf he's practically living in a world of his own. He clearly has a crush on the singer, even though he somehow believes that she paints rather than sings. He's bred a white rose in her honour and named it Bianca Castafiore. As she kisses him in thanks, he blushes. He also invents an odd form of colour television called Super-Calcacolor, which uses filters to translate black and white broadcasts into colour in real time. Of course, it doesn't function as intended as the colours are vibrant but the picture distorts like it's psychedelic surrealism. Salvador Dali would have loved it and so would the Jefferson Airplane.

I never liked Bianca Castafiore, but I never tired of her antics here, which are often magnificently ironic. She shows up with almost no notice, inviting herself in along with a whole slew of others to boot, but, after her picture appears on the front page of 'Tempo di Roma', she castigates Captain Haddock, suggesting that "If you didn't open your door to every Tom, Dick and Harry, this would never have happened!" I may live in fear of her inviting herself into my household, but I laughed loud and often at the way she steamrolls over her host in this album, never once calling him by his real name. He's Captain Stopcock, Captain Drydock, Captain Fatstock, even Captain Maggot, but I must say the one in Emilie Autumn's band is far cuter.

By comparison, I can't spend any time with Jolyon Wagg without wanting to strangle him, but he's fortunately only here briefly. Thompson and Thomson are often a bit much, but they're kept well under control here, popping in, getting something wrong, tripping over something and leaving to return again later and run through the same cycle. They're a running joke anyway, but they seem closer to that definition here than usual. In their way, they're a human equivalent of the broken fourth step on the staircase or the constant wrong numbers that typically somehow involve Mr. Cutts the butcher.

In fact, there are so many red herrings and so many running jokes that Tintin doesn't actually get a heck of a lot to do here, until it's time for him to figure out where the Castafiore Emerald went. Mostly he wanders around solving the nothing mysteries: who's walking around in the attic, what is Igor Wagner doing in town, and who the mysterious photographer is. I frankly lost track of how often Castafiore's jewels go missing, but just as Tintin's about to get his teeth into the mystery, she realises she was sitting on them or some other non-event.

Just in case you hadn't figured it out from everything above, pretty much nothing happens here of note, even though everything happens to camouflage it. And I had a ball with it. This may well be the funniest 'Tintin' yet, even if it's a second anomaly in a row. Maybe Hergé will return to his usual adventure format with 'Flight 714 to Sydney'. I'll find out next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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