The Crab with the Golden Claws is the ninth in the Tintin series. By 1940 and 1941, Herge is living in German-ocupied Belguim, and subject to strict Nazi censorship. He begins publishing Tintin adventures in a newspaper comic strip, and turns his story lines to non-political subjects...an approach which would continue until the liberation of Belguim in 1944.

With a theme of adventure and drug-smuggling in The Crab with the Golden Claws, we finally meet the sometimes-sober Captain Haddock as a series of mysterious clues put Tintin and Snowy on the trail of a dangerous gang of opium-smugglers. Tintin is kidnapped, but after a daring escape at sea, he and Captain Haddock track down the gang in a North African chase which takes them from the burning Sahara desert to the alleys of a Moroccan port.