The Viking Claw (2001) by Michael Dahl

Michael Dahl is the author of more than a hundred books for children and young adults, ranging from fantasy and horror to short stories and non-fiction, but Dahl admitted on his website to have a special fondness for detective stories – naming Agatha Christie as his favorite mystery novelist. An affinity that found expression in the archaeological Finnegan "Finn" Zwake series, published between 1999 and 2002, of which two were shortlisted for the Anthony and Edgar mystery awards. The series-premise alone sounds promising enough, but then I discovered that Dahl penned at least four impossible crime novels!

The Wheels That Vanished (2000) is written for younger, probably preteen, readers than the Finnegan Zwake series, but the plot concerns a bicycle thief who vanishes from a closely watched bridge. The other three locked room novels come from the Zwake series.

The Horizontal Man (1999) reportedly has Finn discovering a dead man in a locked storage room, belonging to his long-missing parents, while in The Worm Tunnel (1999) he comes across a murder inside a sealed tent during an archaeological dig for dinosaur eggs, but the one that attracted my attention is The Viking Claw (2001) – in which people miraculous vanish from a legendary, snow-covered mountain in Iceland. And two of the people who disappeared from Thorsfell (Thor's Mountain) were Finn's parents!

Eight years ago, Leon and Anna Zwake, archaeologists and researchers, traveled to Iceland to hunt for a lost Viking colony, the Haunted City of Tquuli, hidden somewhere in the mountains. According to the legends, Ogar Blueaxe once forced his men to carry a ship up to side of Thorsfell, to hide a treasure of Italian gold in the lost city, but, from the thirteen men who went up, only two returned. This earned him the name of Redaxe and his fabled treasure has remained hidden for over ten centuries! On the third day of the Zwake expedition, the local trackers found the camp abandoned and the only trace was a pair of footprints in the snow, "believed to have belonged to the Zwakes," which began at their tents and ended near "the base of a flat, smooth cliff wall." It looked "as if the Zwakes had been lifted up into the air."

Finding an answer to what happened to the Zwake expedition is the red thread running through this adventure-filled series of globetrotting mystery novels with the shadowy employers of Finn's parents, Ackerberg Institute, lurking ominously in the background. The 14-year-old Finn is accompanied by his uncle, Stoppard Sterling, who's a celebrated, award-winning mystery writer always looking for new plot ideas. So this series is pretty much what you would get if you spliced Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed with the 1990s incarnation of Jonny Quest sprinkled with American and Minnesota pop-culture references. If you ever wanted to read an impossible crime story that references Jesse Ventura's tenure as governor of Minnesota, Dahl has got you covered.

The Viking Claw is the fourth entry in the series and Finn is finally going to Iceland to visit the spot where his now legally dead parents disappeared, because he believes they're still alive and is determined to find out what happened on that snowy slope all those years ago – getting there proves to be arduous journey fraught with danger and sabotage. Uncle Stop has hired two Finnish brothers, Edo and Teema Jokkipunki, as trackers, but Finn and his uncle are not their only clients on that tripe. A second party headed by the Ice Cube King, Ruben Roobick, whose Roobick Cubes sponsors mountain-climbing expeditions all over the world to look for "new brands of ice for their customers." Roobick brought along his wife, Kate, and her personal assistant, Sarah O'Hara. The last member of the expedition is 15-year-old cousin of the trackers, Hrór, who loves weird haiku's and has his own reasons to join the expedition. And this sub-plot actually made good use of a cultural aspect of the setting.

A composite sketch of the suspect

So, as they set out to the spot where the Zwake expedition vanished, they're beset by trouble and setbacks delaying or slowing down their climb. The tires of their minibus are slashed and the motor is wrecked, but the climb itself is not entirely free of danger with its cavernous gas bubbles with thin roofs, "waiting to collapse," and dangerous steam vents in the side of a hundred fifty feet high cliff wall. You can describe the first half of The Viking Claw as a mountaineering adventure with one incident giving Finn an idea about the interrupted footprints in the snow that his parents left behind.

Around the halfway mark of the story, Dahl treats the reader to one of the most imaginative and originally posed impossible disappearances that I have ever come across in a detective story!

The expedition arrives at the one-hundred fifty feet high cliff wall, The Goblin Wall, but hot, white clouds from a steam vent and they can't go any further until they can see clearly again – which forced them to setup a hammock-camp (portable ledges) against the side of the icy cliff. A campsite resembling "a bunch of window washers suspended on the side of a wide, windowless skyscraper." And when they wake up, they discover that one of them had disappeared! The freshly fallen snow lay "undisturbed and printless" a hundred feet below them. What a premise!

Unfortunately, the plot becomes a little muddled towards the end with too many plot-threads that needed tidying up and not enough room to properly tying them together. One of the problems is that the story leaves a lot unanswered when it comes to the disappearance of Zwake's parents.

I've delved a little into this series and apparently Dahl abandoned the series after The Coral Coffin (2002), which left the ongoing storyline unfinished and rendered the coded messages Finn found here pretty much useless. A second problem is the crossing of two plot-threads that resulted in murder, committed very late in the story, but it's the least imaginative or thought out part of the plot. Somewhat of cop-out in one regard. Luckily, the impossible disappearances were handled much better and the no-footprints-in-the-snow situation has an interesting solution. A locked room-trick you don't expect to find in an outdoors setting, but it worked here and was neatly tied to the historical backstory of the setting – leading to an important and shocking discovery. The disappearance from the cliff side of the Goblin Wall is, as to be expected, as novel as its premise and both Finn and his uncle come up with a false-solutions involving portable hang glider and equipment bags!

So, when it comes to the plot, The Viking Claw is a mixed bag of tricks, but there was more good than bad and the story, while muddled towards the end, was well told. More importantly, a good example of the innovation and originality, largely unrecognized, that some of these juvenile detective novels, past and present, brought to the locked room mystery and impossible crime story. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for The Horizontal Man and The Worm Tunnel.