Trichinopoly cigar

Trichinapally-Black-Tiger-Cigar

Trichinopoly cigar, also called Trichies or Tritchies, is a type of cheroot associated with the town of Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu, India. The Trichinopoly cigar was actually manufactured from tobacco grown near the town of Dindigul near the present-day Tiruchirappalli^[1] and formed one of India's main items of export during the Victorian period. The cigars were cheap and of rude manufacture.

In popular culture

• In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887), Sherlock Holmes correctly deduces that the perpetuator of a gruesome murder had smoked a "Trichinopoly cigar". When questioned by Dr. Watson about his methods, Holmes replies that the cigar ashes observed at the spot of the murder were "dark in colour and flaky", as in a Trichinopoly.
• In Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), Lord Peter Wimsey remarks that an acquaintance who once "polluted" a Cockburn 1886 port wine by drinking it while smoking a cheap Trichinopoly cigar was "ear-marked for a bad end".
• "Trichinopoly cigars" are mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones, in the novel The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim.
• The "Trichinopoly" is mentioned several times as the favorite cigar of Dr. John Thorndyke, a character in several books and stories by R. Austin Freeman, especially in The Red Thumb Mark, where it plays an important role.
• In Rudyard Kipling's The Mother Lodge, he includes the line "With the trichies smellin' pleasant an' the hog-darn passin' down". A Hog-darn is a cigar-lighter.
• Trichinopoly cigars are mentioned in George Orwell's novel "Coming Up for Air."

Notes

1. "Trichinopoly". Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911.

References

• Parliamentary debates: Senate and House of Representatives, Volume 39. Parliament of Australia. 1908. p. 4224.
• "Trichies, Tritchies". Hobson-Jobson.