Best 1954 Adventures (5)

By: Joshua Glenn
September 7, 2019

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1954 adventure novels.

Hergé’s Tintin adventure L’Affaire Tournesol (The Calculus Affair, 1954–56; as an album, 1956).

Glass and porcelain items at Marlinspike Hall begin to shatter inexplicably; the next day, Professor Calculus leaves for Geneva to attend a scientific conference. Tintin and Haddock follow him there, only to be run off the road into Lake Geneva… then nearly blown up! We discover that intelligence agents from Syldavia and Borduria — the fictional Balkan nations we’ve already visited in King Ottokar’s Sceptre and Destination Moon — are seeking to obtain an ultrasonic device, capable of being used as a weapon of mass destruction, which Calculus has recently developed. This is espionage thriller along the lines of Ambler’s The Dark Frontier or Cause for Alarm, say, or — closer to home — Edgar P. Jacobs’s Blake and Mortimer comic Le Secret de l’Espadon (1946–1949), and it’s a fun ride. Tintin and Haddock remain one step behind as Calculus is kidnapped by first Bordurians, then Slydavians, then Bordurians again; when they arrive in Borduria’s capital, Szohôd, they’re monitored by Colonel Sponsz’s secret police. Meanwhile, back in Marlinspike, for comic relief, insurance agent Jolyon Wagg and his family move in for a holiday. Will Tintin and Haddock rescue Calculus, and get him home?

Fun facts: The 18th Tintin adventure was serialized in Belgium’s Tintin magazine. Hergé’s depiction of Borduria was based on Eastern Bloc countries; Hergé named the country’s leader Plekszy-Gladz, a pun on Plexiglas, although the comic’s English translators renamed him Kûrvi-Tasch, a mustache joke.

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Best 1954 Adventures (5)

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