Prisoners Of The Sun – Hergé, 1946-49 ★★

Tintin's Most Overrated Adventure?

Sweeping vistas of the snow-capped Andes. Realistic depictions of ancient Incan architecture and every kind of South American animal you can imagine, from bullish tapirs to ornery llamas. Crypt-like hideaways tucked behind imposing waterfalls.

Prisoners Of The Sun boasts all this splendor and more. Graphically, it is a stepping-up point for “The Adventures Of Tintin” the same way The Blue Lotus had been back when the series was just getting started. Storywise, though, author Hergé is content to put Tintin and his buddies through the motions. That could just be my take, as Prisoners is one of the best-regarded of Tintin books.

The Seven Crystal Balls – Hergé, 1943-48 ★★★

Tintin’s Weird Tale

If any installment of the Tintin series had a right to flop, it was this. While author Hergé was writing it, he found himself suddenly unemployed and arrested for Nazi collaboration. Overnight, he went from pop star to criminal. Also, his mother died.

But The Seven Crystal Balls did not flop; just the opposite. It could be argued the book was the best thing to happen not only to “The Adventures Of Tintin” but Franco-Belgian comics; it helped launch a magazine under the “Tintin” banner that became the mothership for a bevy of comic artists and opened a door for Edgar P. Jacobs, a Hergé collaborator who, after his uncredited co-write here, launched his own milestone franchise, “Blake And Mortimer.”

The Father – August Strindberg, 1887 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★½

Throwing Away the Envelope

What would a battle of the sexes look like if participants were less motivated by sexual desire and more by Nietzschean will to power? The Father sets the struggle of man versus woman, or rather husband versus wife, in exactly that context.

Whether the play is valid, illuminating, or entertaining as presented is a different question. I didn’t find it so, but I was born a century after the intended audience. They found this drama convincing enough to help lift its author, August Strindberg, to international fame.

Vanishing Ladies – Ed McBain, 1957 ★★½

Stranger Danger in the Sticks

Pulp fiction is a genre famous for keeping it short. Wham-bam openings; terse dialogue; jump-in action sequences; swift resolutions: What you get is meant to be read fast and enjoyed at once.

Vanishing Ladies presents a baseline example of the genre, with many recognizable staples in place. One variation: the protagonist is a cop, not a private eye or regular joe, which makes sense given author Ed McBain had just launched his 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals the year before publishing this.

Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy, 1874 ★★★½

The Perils of Gaslighting

When a pretty woman flirts with a middle-aged man, you might expect annoyance when he discovers she’s having him on. You don’t expect carnage, which is what happens in this pastoral romantic tragicomedy by Thomas Hardy, Victorian fiction’s master of disaster.

The second of Hardy’s celebrated run of “Wessex” novels, Far From The Madding Crowd details the calamitous romantic history of Bathsheba Everdene, inheritor of a substantial farm in her early twenties who sends a prank valentine to a bachelor named Boldwood who owns the neighboring spread.