The Crab with the Golden Claws is best known for introducing Tintin's best friend and one of the series' most memorable characters: Captain "Blistering Barnacles" Haddock. As Tintin is investigating a mysterious can of crab and a drowned sailor, he meets Haddock, a "miserable wretch" who's being kept in ample alcohol so his insidious first mate, Allan, can run a drug operation.
Crab had to be lengthened to fit the standard 62-page format; fortunately, Herge achieved this by, among other additions, creating four marvelous full-page spreads.
--David Horiuchi
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
The adventure every re-reader of Tintin waits impatiently for, Captain Haddock's debut. We first meet him on board the merchant ship Karaboudjan, his alcoholism being fuelled by a nefarious mate, the hatchet-faced Allan, who is smuggling opium in tins of crab meat. It is curious that such a weak, defeated, decadent figure should become such a beloved, even heroic character for generations of readers - in the context of the Nazi-Occupied Europe in which the book was written, the resonance of Haddock's spiritual progress - from manipulable weakling to tortured prisoner to victim of (collaborationist?) police brutality to ferocious resistant - is easier to fathom. Besides his inability to resist bottle-sized tipples, the captain is famous for a bellicosity unleashed in an inexhaustible gust of arbitrary, all-inclusive epithets ('Rats! Ectoplasms! Freshwater swabs! Bashi-bazouks! Cannibals! Caterpillars!'); his rage often sufficient to ward off enemies. Beneath these terrifying outbursts, however, and the tendency to Thom(p)son-like imbecilities (such as the drunken kindling of a fire on a longboat), Haddock is really a kind of human Snowy, someone whose essentially good instincts are led astray by appetite, someone who needs the affection, reassurance, security and stability offered by Tintin's tolerant friendship. He is a brave man of an earlier, more chivalrous age, stranded in a modernism blighted by criminals and the counterfeit. This marvellously funny episode begins as a mystery story, with Thompson and Thomson investigating the death by drowning of a sailor whose remains include clues that prompt Tintin to investigate the Karaboudjan. In terms of incident and visuals, 'Crab' harks back to the earlier 'Cigars Of The Pharoah' (another introductory adventure, that time the Thom(p)sons), with its drug-smuggling plot, its misadventures at sea, its awesome African sandscapes and the delight offered by Thom(p)sonian buffoonery. The depiction of French Morocco, its eternal sunlight riven with omnipresent shadows, echoes the Metaphysical/Surrealist world of de Chirico, while there are many jokes inspired once again by silent cinema, especially two 'Gold Rush'-quoting hallucinations in which a thirst-crazed Haddock imagines Tintin as a bottle of champagne. An added bonus are four full-page plates you will be sorely tempted to rip from the page and hang on your wall - a looming airplane terrorising our capsized heroes bobbing in a Hokusai sea; a panting Tintin and Haddock trekking an endless desert, happy Snowy chomping the massive bone of a dromedary skeleton and acknowledging the 'camera'; the trio in pursuit down a crowded Moroccan alley, amazingly detailed and coloured, and seemingly on the brink of collapse; and an archway-framed composition of the Thom(p)sons shadowing a suspect in one of their hapeless attempts at blending in with the locals, bournos failing to hide their ever-distinctive black suits, bowlers and moustaches. As ever, Tintin, like Sherlock Holmes, is much more successful with disguise, and learns something about the contempt directed at the poor in certain societies.
