Tintin: The Castafiore Emerald, Flight 714 and Tintin and the Picaros by Hergé

The last three finished novels of Tintin are collected in one place. These are the last three stories written by Hergé, with the exception of one unfinished story "Tintin and the Alph-Art".

In "The Castafiore Emerald", Tintin's friend Captain Haddock is on a walk with Tintin when he meets a bunch of gypsies by the local rubbish dump. Captain Haddock first assumes that the gypsies camp there because they want to, but when he finds out that they have been denied camping rights in any other place, he invites them to stay on the fields of his estate. On his arrival home, he injures himself falling on a broken step on his grand staircase. So when he recieves word that Signora Castafiori is coming to stay with him, he tries to flee immediately, only to injure himself again, much worse, on the same step.

With her, the Duchess brings a famous jewel, the Castafiori Emerald. During her stay, the Emerald goes missing, and Tintin must find out who might have taken it. Of course, the Gypsies are blamed first, but Tintin shows them to be innocent, while Captain Haddock must deal with the rumor that he is about to marry Signora Castafiori inadvertantly started by the newspapermen's interview with Cuthbert Calculus.

In "Flight 714", Tintin and Captain Haddock are travelling to China when they stop in Djakarta. There, they meet an old friend, Sven Skut, who happens to be a pilot for the richest man in the world, Mr Carreidas, who also happens to be someone who has never laughed. But Professor Calculus makes him laugh, twice, so he offers to jet them to China in his personal Jet. Unable to refuse, they board the plane, but Mr. Carreidas's secretary has made plans to betray his employer, and the plane is forced down on a small Pacific island.

On the island is a man named Rastapopulous, who wants to steal the identification number and password to Carreidas's Swiss Bank account, but the man he hires to get the information out of Carreidas, Doctor Krollspell, has manufactured a truth serum to get Carreidas to reveal the necessary numbers. But instead, all it does is make him talk about all the bad deeds he did in life and call himself a monster. When Rastapopulous is accidentally injected with the same serum, he does the same, sending the two men into a fevered competition over who is worse and more of a monster.

Meanwhile, Captain Haddock and Tintin escape from captivity with the help of Snowy, and save Professor Calculus and the others and get them to safety. But the actions of Rastapopulous and his goons set off an eruption of the island's volcano. Who will help them escape in time? Could it be... aliens?

In "Tintin and the Picaros", Tintin is in San Theodoros with Professor Calculus and Captain Haddock, who is suddenly finding he can't stomach the taste of his favorite kind of alcohol. In fact, it nearly makes him sick. The reason they are in San Theodoros is because they heard that Bianca Castafioré and her maid and pianist, along with Thompson and Thomson, have been imprisoned by the ruling powers there, and they are there to try to free them.

However, the man in charge, Captain Sponsz, has set a trap for them and they soon find themselves accused of various crimes. Escaping, they meet a man named Alcazar, whose Picaros are threatening to overthrow the government. But he has a problem. The government has been dropping lots of booze into the jungle, and the man have all become massive drunks. When Professor Calculus steps forward and reveals that it is because of a pill that he developed that Captain Haddock can no longer stand the taste of Alcohol, Tintin makes a deal with Alcazar to free his men from their alcohol addiction and allow them to take over the government and save Signorina Castafiori and her troup and the Thompson/Thomsons. However, even as they sneak the Picaros into the capital in the guise of a band that is to perform at the execution of the Thompson/Thomsons, will things ever really change in San Theodoros?

This was an interesting set of stories, and much more well-rounded and well-drawn than the first book I read. Each is slightly different and shows Hergé's illustrating style and ability to create plots. Each has a different sort of enemy and "The Castafioré Emerald" is an example of a story with many different red herrings that pad out the length of the story, but the reader never feels resentful about the padding, even after the true villain is revealed. The second is a more straightforward adventure story, with aliens, but done in such a way as to make the aliens believable.

In the last story, we begin to see some of the innocence that drew many people to the character of Tintin begin to erode somewhat, as Tintin actually helps put in motion a coup merely to rescue his friends from Prison. Admittedly, he demands that no one be killed during the coup, and that the deposed leader be tried in the courts, but the ending leads us to question how much has really changed for the country with the deposing of one supposedly "Corrupt" leader. Has one just been replaced with another? It's a rather disquieting ending for a Tintin story.

For those who love Tintin, this volume is a welcome treat. The stories do make you wonder, though, if Hergé's future Tintin stories would have continued the trend of making Tintin more adult and less innocent. With the next story, "Tintin and the Alph-Art" unfinished, we do have to wonder.