Tintin Forums

The BBC are running a short series of alternate-reality Sherlock Holmes pastiches this week; Radio 7 have been broadcasting daily, but the BBC web-site has got pages for all of them, including not just links to the audio as streaming RealPlayer, but illustrated text versions too.

The one for tomorrow A Shambles in Belgravia (Thursday 20/01/2005) is by the broadcaster and writer Kim Newman.
In its text form, it is given annotations, one of which (the third on the first page) references Tintin in Prisoners.

The story has Moriarty engaged in calculating the timing and locations of solar eclipses, in order that the information could be used to exploit the people living in those areas by promising to turn the sun back on for them; the footnote adds that this is a popular "long con" used by both adventurer Allan Quartermain (in King Solomon's Mines) and "and the journalist Tintin".

Newman loves to work all sorts of fictional characters into his stories, as Shambles shows: in addition to the Tintin mention, he combines Professor Moriarty and the Zenda tales!

That's quite funny! Not your typical Sherlock Holmes is it? It reminds me a bit of Vivian Stanshall's monologues from Rawlinsons End.

If you listen to it, it works even better than it reads, because Andrew "Snowy" Sachs does Moran as a sort of Terry-Thomas silly ass voice, as opposed to the rather more brutal/ thuggish way he is written in the canon; it is sort of the anti-Nigel Bruce!

Kim Newman is a very amusing writer, and his series of Dracula novels - starting with Anno Dracula, in which Dracula marries Queen Victoria (!) - weave together hundreds of fictional characters and events in a way which is similar, but superior, to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and pre-dates it by almost a decade).

Thinking about, I wonder if there are any Hergé pastiches out there, telling the truth about how General Tapioca was cruelly deposed by the interfering busy-body Belgian, or poor old Rastapopoulos was hounded as a villain, just because he had a strange sounding name and an unfortunate super-abundance in the nasal department?