The Black Island - Contemporary Connections

Contemporary Connections

When The Black Island was originally published in Le Petit Vingtième in 1937, many aspects of the story reflected popular movies of the time, such as Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (an innocent man on the run from the police pursues the real crooks to Scotland) and King Kong (Ranko the gorilla).

While talking to the old local in the pub, Tintin mentions the Loch Ness Monster which had been the subject of recent newspaper reports: the famous "Surgeon's photo" of the monster by Robert Kenneth Wilson had been published in newspapers some three years earlier.

The gang that Tintin confronts is made up of a wide variety of figures:

• The unnamed moustached associate of Wronzoff (or Puschov in the English version) could pass off as a typical cockney crook, similar to Flash Harry of St. Trinian's or Walker of Dad's Army.

• The name Ivan suggests that Müller's chauffeur is a White Russian, exiled by the Bolshevik Revolution.

• The name Dr. J.W. Müller implies that the character is a German. Some have suggested that the 1930s version of Müller is a Nazi German secret agent out to destabilise the British economy. It has been suggested that Müller was based on the adventurer Georg Bell, who was an associate of Nazi leader Ernst Röhm, and was involved in a counterfeiting operation against the Russian ruble.

On 19 March 2010, the British TV network Channel 4 broadcast a documentary entitled Dom Joly and The Black Island in which the comedian Dom Joly re-enacted the story, with him acting as Tintin.