"Now why were they both so keen to buy my ship?" | The Secret of the Unicorn (The Adventures of Tintin) |...

Great album by Tintin | The Secret of the Unicorn (The Adventures of Tintin) | Herge

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	• The Secret of the Unicorn (The Adventures of Tintin) Herge Little, Brown Young Readers, 1974 - 62 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Full of adventure and fun-filled confusion

First published in French in 1943 as The Secret of the Unicorn (Le Secret de la Licorne. An epidemic of wallet snatching in and around Brussels affects the Thom(p)son twins as theylose wallets by the dozen. Meanwhile Tinin sees a curious model ship and decides to buy it for his friend , Captain Haddock , after which he is pestered by dealers to sell it to them.
The Captain unpieces the mystery of the adventures of his ancestor Sir Francis Haddock , who lived in the reign of Charles II , and his battle against the pirates. Meanwhile Titnin finds himself on the wrong side of rogue art thieves , the Bird brothers, and gets kidnapped by them where he does battle with them at their headquarters at Marlinspike Hall.
This is the first in a two part series leading up to Tintin's search for the centuries old lost treasure in Red Rackham's Treasure.As usual , full of adventure and fun-filled confusion, not to mention the historical flashbacks to the escapades of Sir Francis Haddock and the villainous pirate chief , Red Rackham.

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"Now why were they both so keen to buy my ship?"

The Secret of the Unicorn - La Mystere de La Licorne, or the Mystery of the Unicorn, in the original French - is the eleventh installment in the Tintin series. It was also evidently the personal favorite of author Herge.

Like many other Tintin adventures, it spins out of something as seemingly innocuous as can be: Tintin goes to a street fair, sees a model of a ship that he likes, and decides to buy it. Almost instantly two mystery men are hot on his heels as he leaves the place, offering him exorbitant amounts of money. He manages to lose them before he gets back to the flat, but needless to say, this is not the last we've seen of these two in The Secret of the Unicorn.

It later turns out that the ship is a small replica of a real vessel, the Unicorn, that was commanded by none other than Sir Francis Haddock, ancestor of the Captain and possible originator of such Haddockisms as "thundering typhoons," etc. It also comes to light that hidden in the model are parchment scrolls indicating something important about the original ship, which sank ages ago. But by the time Tintin finds this out, his ship has mysteriously disappeared...!

The Secret of the Unicorn as it was originally published in the magazine Le Petit Vingtieme was far too long to be contained in one book; it spills over into a sequel, Red Rackham's Treasure, in which Tintin and friends take the sea to find the sunken Unicorn - but that will have to wait for another review!

(Incidentally, to anyone who wonders, the scale on which I am rating these books is one to five for Tintin, not one to five for everything else. In other words, it starts with great and goes on up from there. Three stars = no slouch.)

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Great album by Tintin

This might not be the best Tintin album, but I considered it a special one for me, as it was the first one I ever read (I still had the copy I bought around 1978, when I was about 9, tattered, and with writings in the margin, as I tried to comment on the action). This was one of the albums that Herge wrote during World War II, when he thought prudent not to dabble into politics as he has done in his previous albums. In Unicorn, Captain Haddock founds that the memories of an ancestor of him, seems to hold clues to a mysterious treasure. The book includes during several pages a very funny story-within-a story of that ancestor, Captain Francis Haddock. Soon, though, Tintin and Haddock found themselves on the run by the Bird brothers, evil antiquaries who have also found about the treasure and want a piece of it. The mansion of Marlinspike (or Moulinsart, in the original) as well as Nestor are introduced in this book. Unicorn, by the way, has a less interesting sequel (though still worthwhile reading), Red Rackham's Treasure, where Tintin and friends rent a boat to try to recover the treasure in the Caribbean. Calculus is introduced in that album.

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The beginnings of true greatness.

Herge, The Secret of the Unicorn (Methuen, 1946)

This is where Herge really started to get great. A series of wallet-snatchings in plaguing Brussels, which Thomson and Thompson are investigating. Meanwhile, Tintin buys an old model of a ship as a present for Haddock, and is immediately accosted by two people who want to buy it from him. Both stories converge when the ship and one of the missing wallets become parts of the key to the final resting place of the Unicorn, Sir Francis Haddock's legendary ship. Just before the Unicorn went down, Haddock had been involved in a great battle with notorious pirate Red Rackham-- and the Unicorn is believed to hold Red Rackham's final treasure. But that's another story. Despite the fact that there's very little story to be found here (this is, after all, setup for Red Rackham's Treasure), Herge throws in all sorts of diversions and red herrings to keep the readers entertained. It's a wonderful read. *** ½

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A nautical treasure hunt

Tintin purchases a model ship at an antiques market. Just after he purchases it two strangers arrive who want to buy the ship. Tintin won't sell it to them even though they offer him ten times what he paid for it. It is a gift for his friend Captain Haddock. The captain is amazed to get the model ship. He shows Tintin a painting of his ancestor, a captain. The captain's ship is visible in the background, and is identical to the model Tintin purchased. The secret to buried treasure is somehow hidden in the model ship, but other parties are also after it...

This particular Tintin book was my favorite when I was a child, mostly because of Captain Haddock. The Captain is continually hollering fake profanities, such as, "Billions of blue blistering barnacles!" I guess that could be a little disturbing now, since the captain acts funny because he is a raging alcoholic (trying to quit though which is a plot point, and I don't think that that is a reason to keep the book from children). This story cuts back and forth in time as bits and pieces of Captain Haddock's family history are shown and trigger new events in the search for treasure.

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When Tintin gives Captain Haddock a model ship, the cartoon characters are led into a bizarre adventure involving pirates from the reign of Charles II.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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