The Crab with the Golden Claws (French: Le Crabe aux pinces d'or) is the ninth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to Morocco to pursue the international opium smugglers.

Tintin is informed by Thomson and Thompson of a case involving a drowned sailor, found with a scrap of paper from what appears to be a tin of crab meat with the word "Karaboudjan" scrawled on it.

His subsequent investigation and the kidnapping of a Japanese man interested in giving him a letter leads Tintin to a ship called the Karaboudjan, where he is abducted by a syndicate of criminals who have hidden opium in the crab tins.

Fooling Allan and his men, Tintin, Snowy, and Haddock escape the ship in a lifeboat after sending a radio message to the police.

[1] After trekking across the desert and nearly dying of dehydration, Tintin and Haddock are rescued and taken to a French outpost, where they hear on the radio that the storm has sunk the Karaboudjan.

Meanwhile, Tintin meets Thomson and Thompson and learn that wealthy merchant Omar Ben Salaad sells the crab tins that are used to smuggle the opium.

While Thomson and Thompson discreetly investigate Ben Salaad, Tintin tracks down Allan and the rest of the gang and saves Captain Haddock, but they both become intoxicated by the fumes from wine barrels breached in a shootout with the villains.

Upon sobering up, Tintin discovers a necklace of a crab with golden claws on the now-subdued owner of the wine cellar, Omar ben Salaad, and realizes that he is the leader of the drug cartel.

[4] On 28 May, Belgian King Leopold III officially surrendered the country to the German army to prevent further killing, a move that Hergé agreed with.

[12] Some Belgians were upset that Hergé was willing to work for a newspaper controlled by the occupying Nazi administration; he received an anonymous letter from "the father of a large family" asking him not to work for Le Soir, fearing that The Adventures of Tintin would now be used to indoctrinate children in Nazi ideology, and that as a result "they will no longer speak of God, of the Christian family, of the Catholic ideal ... [How] can you agree to collaborate in this terrible act, a real sin against Spirit?

[14] Faced with the reality of Nazi oversight, Hergé abandoned the overt political themes that had pervaded much of his earlier work, instead adopting a policy of neutrality.

[15] Without the need to satirise political types, Harry Thompson observed that "Hergé was now concentrating more on plot and on developing a new style of character comedy.

[21] German authorities made two exceptions: Tintin in America and The Black Island could not be reprinted at the time because they were set in the United States and Britain respectively, both of which were in conflict with Germany.

[15] The depiction of the French Foreign Legion in North Africa was possibly influenced by P. C. Wren's novel Beau Geste (1925) or its cinematic adaptations in 1926, 1928, and 1939.

[26] Whereas Hergé's use of Chinese in The Blue Lotus was correct, the Arabic script employed in The Crab with the Golden Claws was intentionally fictitious.

[17] Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters described the story as a "rebirth" for The Adventures of Tintin and described the addition of Haddock as "a formidable narrative element", one which "profoundly changed the spirit of the series".

[38] Fellow biographer Pierre Assouline commented that The Crab with the Golden Claws had "a certain charm" stemming from its use of "exoticism and colonial nostalgia, for the French especially, evoking their holdings in North Africa".

[40] He also thought that the dream sequences reflected the popularity of surrealism at the time, and that the influence of cinema, in particular the films of Alfred Hitchcock, is apparent in the story.

Both feature the smuggling of opium, in crab tins and cigars respectively, and "desert treks, hostile tribes and, at the end, the infiltrating of a secret underground lair".

[26] Stating that the inclusion of a Japanese detective investigating drug smuggling in the Mediterranean makes no sense within the context of 1940s Europe, they ultimately awarded the story three out of five stars.

Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès of Stanford University, in a psychoanalytical review of The Crab with the Golden Claws, commented that this book witnessed Tintin's "real entrance into the community of human beings" as he gains an "older brother" in Haddock.

[52] The film is partially based on The Crab with the Golden Claws, combined with elements of The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure.