The Opium Smugglers

Tintin in Shanghai

The Blue Lotus by Hergé

We pick up the pace immediately, in the very thick of the action. Or rather, just after the action has concluded. In the previous book, Cigars of the Pharaohs, boy reporter — and boy wonder — Tintin (and Snowy, his dog) foiled a smuggling ring who used the classic techniques of a criminal conspiracy to traffic drugs and guns around the world. They sabotaged things, followed people, poisoned many innocent bystanders and opponents of theirs with blow-darts filled with a poison that made them mad. And they tried to kill Tintin (and Snowy) many times, ultimately and thankfully without success.

So here we see Tintin recovering his strength in the lush surroundings of an Indian maharajah’s palace — the place where he concluded the last story. Tintin is helping to secure the remnants of the criminal conspiracy and to work at some of the loose ends that continue to bother him. Snowy is trying to sleep, but is sometimes thrown off his rest. Mostly by Tintin’s zealous working of the shortwave radio, which he is using to pick up cryptic messages associated, he thinks, with the conspiracy at large.

A fakir in the employ of the maharajah tells Tintin that he is in grave danger; that those he thought he had vanquished are building their strength and biding their time in another place. And that if he wants to do something about them, he must be active and energetic and set about it.

This is music, of course, to someone like Tintin’s ears.

Tintin next is informed that the conspiracy has moved to Shanghai, then under Japanese occupation, and that he must go there if he is to prevent the next stage of its master plan — whatever it is.

On the boat over, Tintin (and Snowy) are followed and spied upon. As they arrive in Shanghai, they briefly take in the scenery — many critics argue, and I’d echo, that this was the first of the adventures of Tintin to make serious efforts in the direction of background research — before they meet a cast of characters. They encounter the Japanese man on the spot, who turns out to be a figure in their intelligence services. They meet some dastardly Europeans who live amid the international concessions in Shanghai and treat the locals rather badly. And they get, or Tintin gets, a terrible message: he must return to India at once; the life of the maharajah, his friend, is at grave risk.

All the while, Tintin is spied upon, shot at, is targeted with poisoned tea, is the subject of police attention, of army attention, of the work of intelligence assets.

The precise convolutions of the plot lose something in being spelt out in a review like this. They might seem, when listed out, like a series of unconnected events, of left turns without full justification. Instead, I’d like to describe a little of the character of the book.

There is a lot of the usual action: Tintin hares around by car, by train, by ship. He is hunted by armoured cars, by motorcycles, by aircraft. He must escape arrest, escape kidnapping, poisoning, execution. As usual, there are a number of seemingly hopeless situations; as usual, dramatic and unexpected conclusions arrive in to turn the tables. Tintin gets into a fair few fistfights. He fires his pistol a number of times and many guns are fired at him. But compared to some of the earlier books, I might even be tempted to say that in this comic, the action is a little restrained. It’s constant, but it’s constant more as an undercurrent, more of a continual threat, than as the point in itself — all the story has to offer.

This book, more than its predecessors, has more of an atmosphere of dread. It’s the atmosphere of unwanted military occupation — a historical fact for the China of the 1930s. An atmosphere of terrible apprehension that the characters themselves feel. They feel it most strongly as they contemplate the idea that they will be tortured or punished by a chemical that induces madness. The horror of knowing you’re to be executed at first light tomorrow for a crime you did not commit. The atmosphere of opium dens like the Blue Lotus, an important node in the great trafficking conspiracy.

And some lassitude and horror — the elements necessary in any story of opium smuggling, opium addiction, and the opium gangs.

I don’t want to overstate things. This is no horror classic. We don’t linger too long on the drugs and their effects — even though their vileness is something Tintin and others comment on often enough. But as light entertainment for children, it has an ambiance — the kind of atmosphere that would captivate me all those years ago when, as a very young boy, I first read (and, more importantly, saw the TV adaptation of) The Seven Crystal Balls.

And notably, perhaps, for an early Tintin adventure, in this book, the foreigners — at least the locals — are largely the heroes. They, by which I mean the Chinese, behave admirably and honourably. Some of them help Tintin as equals; others of them are his devoted aides and friends. Few modern readers inclined to question the sensitivities of ninety-year-old books would like this one, I admit. But given its origins, I was surprised by how much sympathy the author affords the Chinese people.

It doesn’t sympathise much with the Japanese. But you pays your money and you takes your chance on that one.

Tintin is not the saviour of the people he encounters. They are busy working to rescue themselves. Tintin is just visiting their country, trying to get to the bottom of his own mystery. But he is a colleague in their struggle, an eager and able friend. One member among many of a resistance waged against a great and shadowy evil.