The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are travelling in Egypt when they discover a pharaoh's tomb with dead Egyptologists and boxes of cigars.

Pursuing the mystery of the cigars, Tintin and Snowy travel across Southern Arabia and India, and reveal the secrets of an international drug smuggling enterprise.

Critical analysis of the story has focused on its innovation, and the Adventure introduces the recurring characters of detectives Thomson and Thompson and villain Rastapopoulos.

Holidaying on a Mediterranean cruise ship, Tintin and his dog Snowy meet wealthy film producer Rastapopoulos and eccentric Egyptologist Sophocles Sarcophagus.

When two policemen (Thomson and Thompson) accuse Tintin of opium smuggling, he escapes the ship and joins Sarcophagus on his search for the undiscovered tomb of the Pharaoh Kih-Oskh, near Cairo.

After successfully capturing all the members of the gang (except the fakir), the Thompsons arrive and explain to Tintin that the Cairo police managed to discover the hideout of the drug smugglers in Egypt.

[8] Hergé was aided in the production of Cigars of the Pharaoh by his assistant Paul "Jam" Jamin, who was heavily influenced by British magazines The Humorist and Punch.

[12] Hergé took influence from the published works of French adventurer and gunrunner Henry de Monfreid, particularly his books Secrets of the Red Sea and The Hashish Cruise.

[13] The idea of mummified bodies being lined up along a wall was adopted from Pierre Benoît's 1919 book L'Atlantide (Atlantis), which had recently been made into a 1932 film by Georg Wilhelm Pabst.

[14] The wall paintings depicted on a cover of Le Petit Vingtième was based on a bas-relief of Hathor and Seti I housed in the Louvre, Paris, while the throne featured in Tintin's dream was adopted from that found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

[14] The inclusion of the secret society operating the smuggling ring was influenced by right-wing conspiracy theories about Freemasonry,[15] with Hergé likely gaining information on the brotherhood from a 1932 article by Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud in the radical magazine Le Crapouillot (The Mortar Shell).

[16] On 24 November 1932, Le Petit Vingtième published a fictional interview between Jamin and Tintin in which the reporter announced that he would be travelling to China via Egypt, India, Ceylon, and Indochina.

Cigars was the first of the Adventures published by Casterman, with whom Hergé had signed a contract in late 1933, although much to his annoyance, they delayed publication until the autumn of 1934, after the culmination of the summer holidays.

[28] A fourth recurring character introduced in this story was the Portuguese merchant Oliveira da Figueira, who would reappear in both the subsequent Adventures set in the Middle East, Land of Black Gold and The Red Sea Sharks.

[34] In cutting down the length of the story, Hergé removed various isolated scenes that added nothing to the development of the plot, such as those in which Tintin confronts a bat, a crocodile, and snakes.

[40] Benoît Peeters exclaimed that with this scene, the reader can imagine Tintin's surprise at encountering an adventure he had not yet had and which included the characters of Captain Haddock and Cuthbert Calculus whom he had not yet met.

[45] They also highlighted the inclusion of the Kih-Oskh symbol throughout the book, describing it as being akin to a recurring musical theme, stating that it added "a note of pure oneirism".

[49] He also praised the scenes set in the Indian colonial bungalow, commenting that it was "claustrophobic and sinisterly dramatic" and worthy of the work of Agatha Christie,[37] opining that the car chase provided "a highly cinematic ending".

[8] Fellow biographer Pierre Assouline thought that the story was difficult for the reader to follow, because the exoticism of the backdrop faded amid the fast pace of the narrative.

[51] Literary critic Tom McCarthy highlighted the prominent role of tobacco in the story, drawing on the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida to suggest the potential symbolism of this.

[53] Cigars of the Pharaoh was adapted into a 1991 episode of The Adventures of Tintin television series by French studio Ellipse and Canadian animation company Nelvana.

[55] In August 2022, it was announced that Pendulo Studios and Microids would be creating an adventure video game adaptation titled Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh.