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Belgium's most famous son, Hergé, confessed privately to his wife that Tintin and his dog Snowy made him “sick”.
“Tintin is no longer me. And I must make a terrible effort to invent [him] ...” he told Germaine Kieckens in previously unseen letters which came up for auction last week.
“If Tintin continues to live, it is through a sort of artificial respiration that I must constantly keep up and which is exhausting me.”
That's gratitude for you. Hergé's Tintin books sold 200 million copies worldwide and made the cartoonist a millionaire many times over. But Hergé is not the first writer to be fed up with his own fictional creation — and he certainly won't be the last.
In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle famously murdered Sherlock Holmes. After writing two dozen stories, Doyle had become utterly sick of his hero. “I weary of his name,” he lamented. “I must save my mind for better things.”
So he drowned his detective in the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. “Couldn't you bring him back?” he was repeatedly asked by adoring fans. “He is at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls,” Doyle retorted. “And there he stays.''
Such was the public outcry over the sleuth's disappearance — fans wore black armbands on the streets — that Doyle eventually relented. Nine years later, in 1901, he was forced to revive his hero in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Only last year Ian Rankin said farewell to his hero, Inspector John Rebus, in Exit Music, his 17th full-length Rebus novel. “I wanted to write about a different side of Edinburgh from the side you see in the Rebus novels,” he said. But Rankin only pensioned off his inspector rather than killed him, so there is still scope and time for him to be resuscitated.
Even JK Rowling has confessed to mixed feelings about letting go of Harry Potter. “I've never felt such a mixture of extreme emotions in my life, never dreamed I could feel simultaneously heartbroken and euphoric,'' she said. When she first let it be known Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows would be the seventh and final title in the series, there was growing speculation that the boy wizard might be bumped off à la Holmes. In fact, he wasn't, and Rowling disclosed that she may write more books in response to a “Save Harry” campaign.
Mystery remains as to whether Hergé was so tired of Tintin that he wanted to terminate him. Hergé died in 1983, leaving the 24th and final adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art, unfinished.
The story ends as Tintin is about to be killed, encased in Perspex and presented as a work of modern art. Whether Hergé intended him to die at the end of the story is not known. But in any case, Tintin would have outlasted his creator no matter how “sick” him Hergé felt.
