Tintin is wondering through the Belgian countryside, out for a nice leisurely stroll, when he sees a plane making an emergency landing. Being the helpful young man that he is he goes to see if he can help but is immediately shot and left for dead. However, as we have discovered, it is very hard to kill Tintin, and it turns out that the bullet only grazed him, and he decides that he must go and investigate, so he jumps on a train and travels to England after discovering that the same plane crashed near Cornwell.
This is the first Tintin album (they seem to refer to the books as albums) in which I discovered that Tintin was not English. Up until that time I was always under the impression that Tintin lived in London (I guess the English versions suggested that, particularly implying that Thompson and Thomson worked at Scotland Yard). However, in this album it is clear that Tintin has to cross the English channel, and as a kid this left me confused, trying to work out where Tintin lived (turns out that it is Brussels).
This is probably nowhere near the best of Herge's work, but it is still very amusing and quite quirky. In this album Tintin is on the trail of some counterfeiters and travels to Scotland to confront them. Once again the Thompson twins are on a false trail as they pursue Tintin for an alleged robbery on the train. We have seen this aspect of the twins before, where they would rescue Tintin because they wanted to be the ones that arrested him. In this album we are also introduced to Loch Lommond whiskey, and we discover that Snowy as a taste for it.
This album has been revised a few times, and I suspect that the version that I read was one of the later versions. The reason I say this is because when he travels from Brussels to the English coast, the train travels on an electrified track. Also, at the end, when he leaves Scotland, he leaves by a large passenger jet, something that I do not believe was available in 1937 (though Hitler had begun using the plane as a means of campaigning, and large planes had been built to drop bombs on Germany during the war). I'm not sure if you could consider it anachronistic though since many of the later editions of Tintin had been moved into a 60s time period, though we do notice that he does travel by ship often (particularly in the Blue Lotus and Tintin in America where he travels by ship to China and America respectively). In the later albums we begin to see him travelling more by plane, to Flight 714 where we discover them in a modern airport travelling by Lear Jet.
This album is still a good album, and scenes where the huge gorilla is running away from little Snowy is quite impressive. I note that Snowy seems to speak a lot less here, though the attitude of Tintin towards his dog has changed since the original album (where Tintin would constantly chastise him for not being obedient) however we see Tintin punish Snowy for his alcoholism in this particular story. ( )