Top of the Class: Q.E.D, vol. 7-8 by Motohiro Katou

Back in January, I reviewed volume 4 from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series and alluded to my intention to reach volume 10 before the end of the year, but we are nearing the halfway mark of 2020 and have only read two further volumes – discussed here and here. So I decided to speed things up a little bit with this twofer review of volumes 7 and 8.

The story opening volume 7, entitled "Serial John Doe," is one of the longest, most ambitiously written and complexly constructed stories in the series with a subversive play on the denouement. Some would probably call it an anti-detective story.

Sou Touma hardly needs an introduction at this point, but the plot of "Serial John Doe" makes it necessary to point out that Touma, a young genius, is an MIT graduate who moved back to Japan to live as an ordinary high-school student. Touma's day as an MIT student tend to come back to him, as seen in volume 2, which introduced one of his American friends, Syd "Loki" Green. Once again, Loki returns with some unsettling news. Someone has cleverly murdered the aces of the MIT departments of genetic technology and aerospace engineering.

The first victim, Kamenev, attended a lecture on quantum mechanics at the University of Moscow and was found dead the following day in a forest, more than 30 km from the city, but to get him "drunk and freeze to death" you would have needed "all the vodka in Moscow" – traces of a sleeping drug and a missing car confirmed there was more to the case. The second victim was the ace of the aerospace department, Liu Shen Chi, whose decayed body was found floating in a derelict boat off the coast of Macao, China. Liu had been poisoned with uranium and "a calculation ruler from old times," used to calculate logarithms, was found by the corpse.

Loki considers the possibility that more aces in other fields of study will also become victims and Touma, a former ace of the mathematics department, is very likely on the killer's list. So he asks Kana Mizuhara to keep an eye on Touma, but this weird story becomes impossible to describe any further. Needless to say, there are more murders, an attempt to kill Touma and a complex code with philosophical underpinnings, but, essentially, the story is a pure whydunit with the motive superseding the identity of the globetrotting serial killer. I still don't know whether, or not, I like the ending, but it certainly was something entirely different.

The second story, "A Melancholy Afternoon," is much shorter and simpler in nature, but with a good, solid plot and a warm, human touch to the characterization of the suspects.

On a lazy, Saturday afternoon, Touma and Mizuhara enter a floral shop on a whim and are immediately detained, because they were two of the six people in the shop when a sum of money went missing from owner's private office. The shop owner, Okuda Kousuke, had withdrawn a hundred 10,000 yen bills, one million yen in total, that morning from the bank to cover operational costs and paying wages, but left the envelope on the desk of his office – since the "room is like a safe" with the only window locked and equipped with a burglar alarm. And the only door was under constant observation of the three employees. There's a full-time employee, Ooshima Keiko, assisted by two students working part-time, Gotou Toshio and Watanabe Miyuki. But when the salaries were deducted, Kousuke discovered that he was 50,000 yen short. Someone had taken a pretty packet of money from the envelope! And there were only a handful of people who could have taken it.

Kousuke told the police that all three of his employees "wanted part of their wages to be paid up front this month," but the reason why they needed money is devoid of the usual selfish greed and gives the story a memorable ending when Touma finally decides to intervene. Touma does more than merely solving the crime. He fixes the problems of the people who work there and ensures the culprit is not punished, but, in order to do that, he has to explain how the money disappeared when everyone in the shop had an alibi. A clever trick, to be sure.

"A Melancholy Afternoon" is one of those rare examples of a high quality filler story and a good yarn to end this volume with! So, all in all, a slightly unusual, but good, entries in this often unconventional series. Recommended!

The first story of volume 8, "Falling Down," brings Touma and Mizuhara to Otowa Village, where they intended to bungee jump from a bridge, but the facility has been temporarily closed down when the instructor of the local fire-fighting academy, Oosawa Kunio, died there under mysterious circumstances – falling to his death from the bridge. An accident seemed unlikely and there was no motive for suicide. So everyone in the village suspected the universally respected firefighter had been pushed to his death. There is, however, one problem: only one person had a possible motive to murder the instructor, Hayami, a rookie firefighter who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father. A firefighter who died in the line of duty when he saved a child from a burning building, but the instructor had kicked him out of the academy.

You see, Hayami is "dreadfully afraid of heights" and "couldn't even bring himself to cross the bridge." On top of that, Hayami has an alibi for the time of the murder. So, if he did it, how did he manage to toss a strong, sturdy and experienced firefighter from a bridge he didn't even dare to cross?

So another one of those quasi-impossible crime stories with a highly unconventional, but original, alibi-trick only marred by the lack of clueing. Nevertheless, the trick is a good example of the ingenuity found in these shin honkaku detective stories.

The second and last story of volume 8, "School Festival Melody Mania," begins on the eve of the school festival and the students of the various school clubs stay behind at school to prepare the various stages and a haunted room – including Touma and Mizuhara. On the following day, they discover that most of the stages have been wrecked during a blackout that occurred the previous night. The security guard swore that, other than the students who stayed the night, nobody else went into the stage area. So the culprits have to be among them. However, a time table clearly shows that "every club who had a motive has an alibi."

Once again, Touma has to reluctantly play the role of high-school detective and, one by one, collapses all of the alibis and the solution turns out to be a tricky, but amusing, play on a very well-known detective novel. A second thing worth mentioning is the character development of Touma, a typical lone wolf, who suddenly finds that "the world is slowly, bit by bit, becoming integrated" with himself and he's actually began to interact with the people around him. Something he's not used to and "it just feels weird." And he didn't like it either when a member of the music club was performing his mating rituals around Mizuhara.

So, on a whole, these two volumes weren't quite as strong as the stories collected in volume 5 and 6, but they were still pretty good full with good and experimental ideas, clear continuity, original tricks, great settings and better characterizations than usually found in these anime-and manga detective series – which are usually very plot-driven series. This is makes Q.E.D. such a strange, but fascinating, detective series to explore. So you can expect another twofer review of volumes 9 and 10 in the comings weeks.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) by E. and M.A. Radford

I can't remember where I read this, or who said it, but someone once posited that if the dead who had been murdered and buried as tragic victims of accidents, suicides or simply natural causes would rise from their graves to hold a candle – every cemetery in the world would be brightly lit. Whoever said it, the mystery writing husband-and-wife team of Edwin and Mona Radford would have disagreed with him.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) is the eight case of Dr. Harry Manson and, unlike the previous novels in the series, the book is an inverted detective story in the mold of R. Austin Freeman. In their foreword, the Radfords wrote that they hoped the story may act as "a warning to those people who may think that they can commit a crime" and "get away with it." Because they can't. The Heel of Achilles is a demonstration why the logical, scientifically educated detective invariably gets his man.

The Heel of Achilles takes the classical approach to the inverted mystery with the first part telling the story of the murderer and his victim-to-be, showing every detail of "a cast-iron plot of murder" that "nothing could detect as being other than an accident," while the second part unmercifully lays bare all the mistakes the murderer made along the way – ending the story on a somewhat depressing note. So the book is really two novellas in one that can actually be read as two separate, standalone tales of crime and detection.

In the first part, entitled "Story of a Murder," the reader is introduced to Jack Edwins, a humble garage mechanic, who became the unwitting accomplish in a scheme hatched by a petty crook and racehorse gambler, James Sprogson. A simple burglary to quickly snatch "thousands of pounds' worth of stuff," but a police whistle interrupted them and Edwins was left standing with his pockets stuffed with jewelry! Sprogson was the only one who shot from the house into the waiting hands of the policemen and this meant Edwins had an opportunity to silently make his exit, which he did without being weigh down by the fortune spilling from his pockets. A fortune he used to change his name, marry the love of his life and a buy his own service station, but put some of his hard earned money aside to anonymously repay the owner of the stolen goods.

Sprogson, on the other hand, was sentenced to three years penal servitude and, when he was released, Edwins had vanished from the face of the earth and Jack Porter, of the Green Service Station, had taken his place. Only a fluke brought Sprogson, now James Canley, back to Porter. What he wants is his cut of the money and then some. So he decided to kill Canley in order to keep what he had built for the woman he loved so much.

Porter is "an omnivorous reader of detective stories" and "modelled his plan on the mistakes made by the lawbreakers in the novels he had read," which gave him the idea to stage an accidental death and meticulously goes to work – presenting the local police with a decapitated corpse lying on the track of a railway line. The local authorities are willing to accept that it was nothing more than an unfortunate railway accident, but the railway doctor insisted on calling in Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Harry Manson.

As an aside, if The Heel of Achilles had been a regular detective story, the murder would have come very close to being an impossible crime, with a single track of footprints leading from the victim's cottage to the tracks, had it not been for "the long grass verge that edged the track."

The second part of the story, "Cherchez L'Homme," brings Dr. Manson to the scene of the crime and laboriously begins to poke holes in, what seemed to be, a relatively watertight scheme. Dr. Manson patiently explains every step of his investigation and reasoning, but, to do this properly, the local police officers had to be little denser than usual ("very trustworthy, you know, but no thinker").

However, the payoff is that you get to see a painstaking destruction of a carefully laid plan with apparently nothing linking the victim with his killer. A beautiful combination logical reasoning and forensic detective work. On top of that, Dr. Manson tells the story of two locked room murders, over the course of his investigation, as a basic exercises in logic and gives the story of Maria Lee, a.k.a. Black Maria, as the origin of the police van's name – a claim that has since been disputed by the internet. Still, it was a fun little story and coming across these shreds of arcane history and knowledge is always a bonus you get from these vintage detective novels.

Slowly, but surely, Dr. Manson proves the accident was murder and treads closer to the murderer with every passing chapter, which made realize that a truly scientific mystery novel is playing the detective story in god mode. Where the more intuitive or workman-like sleuths have to interpret nebulous clues or pick apart alibis, the scientific investigator can pick up the trail of nameless, faceless killer by studying cigar ash, dust and small fibers. It's almost unfair to the hardworking, sympathetic murderer and even Dr. Manson says at the end of the story that he never "concluded a case with less satisfaction." An ending painfully showing that justice and restoration of order isn't always what it's made out to be.

The Heel of Achilles is a well written and carefully plotted inverted detective novel with the first half focusing on the personal side of the murder and the second half presenting the impersonal examination of the crime, in which Dr. Manson demonstrates that every contact leaves a trace – wringing the truth from the physical evidence the murderer so cleverly tried to alter or destroy. More importantly, the hardest thing to do with an inverted mystery is to keep the reader interested when they already know all of the answers. I believe the Radfords succeeded here by making it a challenge to the reader, of sorts, by serving their readers with a seemingly airtight murder plot and than pointing out the holes. So easily one of the most meticulously plotted inverted detective stories, right up there with John Russell Fearn's Pattern of Murder (2006), and comes highly recommended!

Death Out of Nowhere (1945) by Alexis Gensoul and Charles Grenier

One of my little pet peeves with Robert Adey and Brian Skupin's locked room bibliographies is the inclusion of novels and short stories that were either erroneous advertised or mistakenly perceived as impossible crime stories, but have since been identified as non-impossibilities – receiving a "not impossible" comment with their entries. I think these entries are a waste of page space and could have been easily fixed by listing them at the back of the book with the comment that they aren't locked room mysteries.

A particular egregious example is Elizabeth George's 800-page tome, A Traitor to Memory (2001), which apparently is one of those psychological, character-driven crime novels listed by Skupin in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) as a non-impossible crime. Strangely enough, this entry came to mind when I finished reading the latest offering from John Pugmire's treasured Locked Room International.

La mort vient de nulle part (Death Out of Nowhere, 1945) by Alexis Gensoul and Charles Grenier is more of a novella than a novel, scarcely a 100 pages long, but jam-packed with phantom shootings inside locked or watched rooms. The complete opposite of A Traitor to Memory!

Death Out of Nowhere presents the reader with a classic, well-worn premise when four "inseparable friends" gathered for their annual gathering at the small lodge of Breule Manor where, each year, Baron Pierre de Malèves "offered them a peaceful and economical vacation." A group of friends comprising of a celebrated mystery novelist, Jules Dublard, a newspaper reporter for L'Informateur, Lucien Darlay, a school supervisor, Louis Beaurieux, and a registration clerk, Yves Le Bellec – who begin the story with a discussion of one of Dublard's locked room puzzles. When left alone, Le Bellec asks Dublard if wants an opportunity to display his talents.

An opportunity to match wits "a master who has taken every precaution not to leave the slightest trace" of his "beautiful crime." Only thing Dublard has to do is fix the time of the crime and show how it was done. Dublard picked up the gauntlet.

Le Bellec theatrically placed a handkerchief on his head, took out a pack of playing cards and threw the king of spades to the floor while shouting, "the Emperor of China be damned." A silly looking, but soon to be ominous, ritual that would be repeated several times throughout the story and always with the same result. A gunshot, somewhere in the direction of the manor, shattering the peace.

The first victim is the elderly great-uncle of the Baron, Antoine de Malèves, whose body is found in his room with a bullet in his back, but the door was bolted and the closed window was covered with metal shutters – no weapon was found inside the room! Commissaire Machaux with the baffling, seemingly impossible, shooting of an inoffensive, seventy-year-old butterfly collector. But the best, most amusing part of this still very traditional portion of the story is Dublard "constructing extravagant hypotheses" showing how different people could have achieved the seemingly impossible. I loved it when he started firing off false-solutions like a vintage Gatling gun!

However, the traditional manor house mystery soon veers into pulp territory when a second murder is committed under nearly identical circumstances and a third person is wounded in a salon with both doors under observation. These phantom shootings are followed by yet another impossible murder! As you probably can expect, not every locked room-trick employed in a multi-impossible crime story is going to be first-rate. The third shooting uses a very slight variation on a familiar, well-worn trick, creaking with age, while the fourth shooting was simply disappointing, but I can see why the first and second murder earned it a place on Roland Lacourbe's Locked Room Library – a list of essential novels which should be included in "any respectable (French) locked room lover's collection." A "truly original method of causing death" and "a machine for creating an alibi."

Don't get me wrong, the solution is pure, unfiltered pulp and not to everyone's taste, but I've developed a taste for pulp-style impossible crime stories. So probably liked it a little more than most readers.

It's very tempting to compare Death Out of Nowhere to the (translated) detective novels by Gaston Boca, Pierre Véry and Noël Vindry, but I commented on JJ's review that everything about the story struck me as the French equivalent of John Russell Fearn and Gerald Verner. My observation turned out to be spot on! As the story progressed, Death Out of Nowhere began to remind me more, and more, of those two pulp writers. I can even name you a novel by Fearn that uses the same principle, as the first murder here, to create a locked room puzzle with only difference being is how exactly death was delivered to the victim.

Unfortunately, the story also shares one of the shortcomings of the pulps: a lack of proper clueing. Death Out of Nowhere gives the armchair detective no opportunity to work out any part of the plot and even the map given early on the story withholds a detail that's shown in a map in the last chapter. And that last chapter shows that a lot more was withhold from the reader over the course of the investigation. So this is story you simply have to read and enjoy, instead of trying to participate as the silent detective, but this short, tightly written and well-paced story is perfect to do exactly that. You're just along for the ride.

So, all in all, Death Out of Nowhere is a curiosity of the locked room genre, but a tremendously enjoyable one, overflowing with lively and fanciful terrors, but the short length ensures this unusual, pulp-style detective story doesn't overstay its welcome – which helped balance out its strengths and weaknesses. Once again, not everyone's going to love it, but, if your taste runs in the direction of the pulps, you have Death Out of Nowhere a shot.

Bruised Memories: Q.E.D, vol. 6 by Motohiro Katou

Last month, I reviewed the 5th volume from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D., a manga detective series that ran from 1998 to 2005, which comprised of two splendidly plotted and executed stories that presented the reader with a pair of corpse-puzzles – a specialty of the Japanese detective story. A tremendously enjoyable volume that left me determined to get to the next one before another 6-12 months disappeared from the calendar.

The first story of the volume 6, entitled "Uncertain Memories," made me realize how surprisingly linear and well paced the time-line of this series actually is.

I remember the stories from volume 2 take place over the summer of 1998 and volume 3 has two stories set respectively in December and the winter of 1999. The opening story from volume 4 centers on April Fools' Day with the stories from volume 5 covering the remainder of the year until "Uncertain Memories" picks up at the dawn of the new millennium, December 29th, 1999, with a strangely fitting, character-driven slice-of-life mystery – which introduces the clumsy sister of the 16-year-old protagonist, Sou Touma. Yuu Touma has an superb hearing with an uncanny knack for catching "the rhythms of the different sounds that she hears" and "amazing at memorizing words from foreign languages," but she's prone to stumbling around. Yuu came back to Japan to celebrate the New Year with her brother.

Touma rarely talked to Kana Mizuhara about himself, or his family, and she learns something about him from his sister, which provides the story with one of the two problems centering on the brother and sister. Yuu tells Mizuhara that their parents thought they were very different children, because her dangerous, reckless behavior always required the full attention of their parents and this left Touma to his own devices. A picture emerges from her story of a kind, but lonely, distant child who didn't show any emotions.

When they were younger, Touma would bring home wounded birds and squirrels from the park to take care of them, often "until late at night," but, when the animals were nursed back to health, he immediately returned them to the park and left without turning back – an attitude he also displays towards his fellow humans. But the memory that stings Yuu the most is when her brother showed no interest when her childhood dog went missing. And didn't even help to look for the dog. Why he acted so cold and distant at the time is main question of the plot with the answer bridging the gap between the two siblings as the clock ticks away the last days of the 20th century, which helps them "to face the new world."

This story also has a sub-plot that begins when Yuu is knocked down in the street by a shoplifter, but she can't remember exactly what happened before hitting her head. Touma and Mizuhara have to retrace her steps, following a linguistic clue, in order to clear her name. A very minor side distraction to an otherwise interesting, character-building story of the type you never find in series like Case Closed or The Kindaichi Case Files.

The second story, "Secret Blue Room," brings the reader right back to the traditional detective story with an impossible crime story, but, unlike the title might suggest, the story is not a locked room mystery. This story is about the murder of a sleazy skydiver in mid-air!

Mizuhara uses a ploy to get Touma to take her skydiving, but when they arrive at the drop zone to prepare for the dive, they watch how a four-man skydive team, known as Stardust, attempt to do a formation jump when one of them plummets down to earth – seemingly saved by a device that automatically opens the chute when something goes wrong. The skydiver, Nomaki, gently crashes down to the ground and the first to check on the victim is the leader of the group, Morokawa Shizuo, who removes the parachute only to discover a knife-handle sticking out of his back!

It's cleverly acknowledge early on in the story that, because "it's impossible to stab someone mid-air," the police suspects the team leader "stabbed the victim on the ground when nobody was looking." A classic locked room-trick that can immediately be disregarded as a possible answer to the stabbing and sends the reader scurrying in a different direction, but the Morokawa Shizuo still has a rock-solid motive. Exactly a year before the murder, his girlfriend died in a strange skydiving accident and rumors have been swirling around that Nomaki had sabotaged her parachute.

So this gave me the idea that Morokawa had planted the knife in a dead, or dying, Nomaki to protect the real murderer, who had poisoned or drugged Nomaki, by giving this person an airtight alibi with a seemingly impossible, mid-air murder – directing the attention of the police to himself. However, no further details emerged that could have confirmed my little hypothesis, such as an autopsy report, which forced me to abandon it well before the end. The actual solution works with a similar, classic locked room technique as the false-solution, but applied to skydiving and has some subtly planted, visual clues hidden in the panels. Touma plays a dangerous game of bluff poker by, anonymously, calling all of the suspects and confronting the murderer under dangerous circumstances. This made for a very satisfying ending to an excellent volume.

Like I've said in a previous review, I can't quite put my finger on why I enjoy this series so much, because, as a detective series, it often walks a fine tight-rope between the kind of detective stories I normally love and despises – such as a character heavy, practically none-criminal story followed by an impossible crime story. Somehow, it works with this series and found the first story as good and fascinating as the second one. So, I don't know, maybe it's the time period in which the story is set that helps make these stories so appealing. Anyway, you can probably expect a review of volume 7 and 8 before the end of the month.

The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939) is the 21st novel in the Ludovic Travers series, originally published under the attention-grabbing title The Case of the Flying Ass, but Dean Street Press decided to reprint this, once exceedingly rare, novel under a less foolish sounding title – a title change that was not explained, or acknowledges, in Curt Evan's introduction. I think The Case of the Flying Jackass would have been a better compromise between the old and new title.

The Case of the Flying Donkey forms a two-book arc, of sorts, with The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940) set in France before the outbreak of the Second World War. Evans described these novels as  "a heartfelt tribute to a nation that soon was to be mercilessly scourged by German invasion and occupation." However, the rummy story of the flying donkey also shows that the English can find the French a trying people to be around.

Three years previously, Travers purchased a painting in Paris on the advise of his artistic friend, Inspector Laurin Gallois, of the Sûreté Générale, who acts as the substitute of the sorely missed Superintendent George Wharton. 

The picture is a still-life by Henri Larne, "a new, tremendous figure in French art," who signs all his work with the tiny drawing of a winged donkey, but, years later, this picture attracts the unwanted attention of a dodgy, Parisian art dealer, Georges Braque – a slippery rascal who left behind an invitation to visit him when he's in Paris. Travers is intrigued as to "the precise nature of his rascality" and happened to be planning to spend a fortnight abroad with his wife, Bernice, but Gallois advises him to ignore Braque until he contacts him. And just to tell his strange story to Larne to see what he makes of it.

Not long after his talk with Gallois, Travers is called on the phone by Braque to ask if he could see him at his private apartment at six o'clock, but, when Travers crossed the threshold of rue Jourdoise, he stumbles over the still warm body of the disreputable art dealer. A knife was stuck sideways in the ribs!

The Case of the Flying Donkey has several converging plot-lines, but they're all involve the handful of characters that populate the story, which makes the story feel like a small, private affair. Firstly, there's the famous painter, Henri Larne, with his parasitical half-brother, Pierre, who exhausted his brother's patience. Elise Deschamps is the model Henri employed as a model for his next painting, but she turns out to have a link with Braque. What about the Braque's business partner, Bernard Cointeau, who has the misfortune of having an unconfirmed alibi? Or the two servants, Hortense and Bertrand, hovering in the background.

So, most readers probably won't have any problem with reeling in the murderer from this small pool of suspects well before the end of the story, but this still leaves you with two questions to answer, why and how, because the murderer possesses "an alibi which is more than perfect" – an alibi-trick Travers labeled as "one of the best" he has ever encountered. There's an undeniable elegance and imaginative quality as to how the alibi was staged, but Travers has encountered better and more original cast-iron alibis. 

For example, Cut Throat (1930) and The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936) are masterpieces of the alibi-busting detective story with fiendishly clever manipulations of time, while The Case of the Hanging Rope (1937) has one of the most audacious alibis in the series with a highly unpredictable element. That being said, this alibi-trick still showed, as Nick Fuller once said, that Bush was to the unbreakable alibi what John Dickson Carr was to the impossible crime.

The strongest link in the plot was the scheme, "a veritable gold-mine," which is at the heart of the murder case that tied everyone, and everything, together and gave the story its title. Particularly, the motive and the shady art dealings were very well done.

However, The Case of the Flying Donkey lacked the complexity of the earlier 1930s novels and is comparable, plot-wise, with the latter, less densely plotted, entries in the series such as The Case of the Haven Hotel (1948), The Case of the Fourth Detective (1951) and The Case of the Amateur Actor (1955). A short and relatively minor novel that could have been even shorter had Gallois shown all his cards to Travers and not regarded "the mystifying of his partner as the first essential." Gallois redeemed himself a little when he clasped eyes on a couple of monstrosities of modern art and told Travers "there is the kind of thing on which I would not even spit."

So, on a whole, I found The Case of the Flying Donkey to be an unevenly written and plotted detective story that read like an expended short story or novella, which makes it only recommendable (with reservations) to loyal fans of the series – who are the most likely to appreciate the different track Bush took here. But, if you're (somewhat) new to the series, I recommend you start at an earlier point in the series.

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.