The Broken Ear (French: L'Oreille cassée) is the sixth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero. First serialized in Le Petit Vingtième from 1935 to 1937, and first collected in book form in French in 1937, it was later redrawn and colourised in 1943.

Storyline

A fetish which originally belonged to a tribe of South American Indians is stolen from the Museum of Ethnography in Brussels. The following day it is back in the museum, along with a note apologizing for the inconvenience caused, saying that the reason for the theft had been a bet. Tintin, who is among the reporters looking into the story, realizes that the replacement is a fake, the distinction being an ear broken on the original but intact on the replacement.

He peruses a book from his own library with an image of the fetish, drawn by an explorer: it confirms that one of the ears is damaged, while the one back in the museum is not. Tintin then reads that a wood carver called Balthazar has died. Suspecting that Balthazar made a duplicate of the fetish and was murdered, Tintin tries to obtain the man's parrot in order to get a clue to the killer's identity. But he soon discovers that a pair of South Americans — Alonso Perez and Ramon Bada — are also on the trail of the fetish, following the same clues and employing more ruthless methods. They even make attempts on Tintin's life.

The parrot eventually repeats the last words of his late owner, naming a man called Rodrigo Tortilla as his killer. Alonzo and Ramon know Tortilla, and Tintin, having tracked them down, overhears their conversation. This takes the three men, and their attempts to outwit each other, to South America, where the plot thickens....

[Download File]