Year: 1932

Important Characters: Tintin, Snowy, The Thompsons, Rastapopoulos, Senior Oliviera de Figuera

French Title: Les Cigares du Pharaon

This fourth Tintin adventure certainly shows the elements of a serialised work. It contains many themes associated with suspense novels: a mysterious curse, a secret society and a poison that drives people mad. In order to get his readers more interested in the plot of Tintin's adventure, Hergé began to play with his readers. Every week in Le Petit Vingtième an article appeared entitled The Tintin Mystery which asked questions of the reader and presented the most ingenious answers received. This column continued right up to the publication of King Ottokar's Sceptre and proved to be extremely popular.

The adventure, originally called Tintin in the East was clearly influenced by events of the time, especially the affair of the curse of Tutankhamen. This seemed to interest Hergeé so much that he returned to the subject of curses years later in The Seven Crystal Balls. In the end, however, this is just a background for the more concrete and serious subject of drug and arms trafficking.

The best known trafficker of the time was the Frenchman Henry de Montfreid, who had just published a very successful autobiography Secrets of the Red Sea. It appears that the captain of the vessel which saves Tintin from drowning is based on De Montfreid, showing that even gun-runners have a good side. Other characters are introduced in Cigars of the Pharoah who play a large part in subsequent adventures: the villain Rastapopoulos, the super salesman Oliviera de Figueira and, of course, the twin detectives Thomson and Thompson who, in the black and white version, are called X33 and X33A.

Hergé made some interesting changes to the book when he recasted it in 1955. Among these are the cutting out of a section in which Tintin comes face to face with a frightening collection of snakes. Another curious change in detail occurs on page 15 of the book, when the Sheik tells Tintin that he has followed his adventures for many years. He presents Tintin with one of the books of his adventures. The book in question was, in the first version, Tintin in America. In the second it was Tintin in the Congo, but in the 1955 version, it was changed to Destination Moon, an adventure Tintin was not even near embarking on. It must have truly surprised Tintin to read about an adventure which he was to undertake in the future, containing friends such as Haddock and Calculus whom he had not yet met!