I have long been a fan of mystery. I became obsessed with the Hardy Boys, then moved to Agatha Christie and other similar writers and enjoy movies and television shows based on those types of books.
In that vein, I recently stumbled across a 1934 mystery titled Cain's Jawbone that has become a recent obsession with readers around the globe and it is seductive.
The lissome little murder mystery retails for $15 and totals 100 pages. The novel’s cover, depicting a murdered man’s legs on a library floor, is an enticing blend of turquoise, bright yellow and pale orange. It was written in 1934 by a British crossword master, and, according to the book's jacket, “the pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible - through logic and intelligent reading - to sort them into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers.”
Just 100 pages? How hard could it be?
Then you start reading - and realize why only four people have solved the puzzle since its publication.
“I stabbed once,” (Page 38), “and even as I did so, I thought of skinny old Marat in his slipper bath, the nightcap about his forehead, the dim light of the candle, the shadow at the door, the stealthy tread of Charlotte Brontë with the undulled blade.”
“Had not the author of Wails of a Tayside Inn said of them that they were the living poems and that all the rest were dead?” (Page 93). “Had not the singer of Wimpole Street said that they were binding up their hearts away from breaking with a cerement of the grave?”
And yet the long-ignored novel is witnessing an unexpected explosion of puzzle-solving popularity. It began when two Englishmen unearthed the text and decided to republish it in 2019; about a year later, a crossword author managed to become the fourth person in history to come up with the correct solution.
That earned a smidgen of media coverage - but things really took off when a TikTok user in San Francisco picked the slim volume up at her local bookstore and started posting videos about her attempts to solve it. Her first video, published in November 2021, earned 6.6 million views. Within hours, Cain’s Jawbone sold out on Amazon.
The craze has continued: As of last December, the book had sold 325,000 copies and is being translated into 12 languages.
The novel has united people around the world in an obsessive quest to unearth the answer, generating online communities, prompting many to turn rooms of their homes into “murder walls” plastered with book pages - and inspiring one woman in Colorado to propose an artificial-intelligence-based method for solving the novel.
Cain’s Jawbone was written by Edward Powys Mathers, known in Britain as the father of the cryptic crossword, a form of crossword - largely nonexistent in America - in which the crossword clues themselves contain the answers, but in an encoded or encrypted form. These word puzzles are devilishly difficult, and Mathers became the undisputed king of the genre in the early 20th century.
Under the nom de plume “Torquemada” - a pseudonym he adopted to imply he would be as cruel to readers as Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tómas de Torquemada - Mathers penned 670 crosswords for the Observer over the course of his career. His cryptics became known internationally: Each week, thousands of people would submit solutions from places as far away as Alaska and West Africa.
In 1934, Mathers issued a compendium of his work titled the Torquemada Puzzle Book. Tacked onto the end of the book was Cain’s Jawbone. Torquemada announced a contest to solve the book, promising successful entrants a prize of 25 pounds, or roughly $2,500 today.
The challenge drew two solvers in its first year: “W. S. Kennedy” and “S. Sydney-Turner.” (In an odd freak of literary fate, the second solver appears to be Saxon Sydney-Turner, a friend of Virginia Woolf and the least-known member of the
Bloomsbury circle, a man dismissed by the biographers of his more famous friends as “taciturn, pedantic, fussily jocose" and “brilliant in a crossword puzzle-solving kind of way.")
But after that, the world forgot Cain’s Jawbone.
Until one wet afternoon in November 2016 when Mitchinson came to sip tea with Wildgust at Shandy Hall, the museum where Wildgust has spent years amassing an impressive collection of unusual literature.
That afternoon, he showed Mitchinson Cain’s Jawbone. Wildgust had attempted to solve it a few times but gotten nowhere.
Mitchinson was intrigued. He tried to solve it himself but gave up after scanning 40 pages of what looked like nonsense. Wildgust told Mitchinson that he had managed to unearth the solution by trawling through his vast network of booksellers and ultimately locating an elderly man in a nursing home who still had both his own answers and a signed note from Torquemada himself congratulating him for getting it right. (The nursing home resident, whose name has not been shared publicly, brought the total number of solvers up to three.)
All of this gave Mitchinson an idea: print 5,000 copies and make the book a cult thing for literary people.
In its first year on the market in 2019, Cain’s Jawbone sold roughly 4,000 copies. Mitchinson and Wildgust also launched a contest, offering anyone who developed the correct answers by September 2020 a prize of 1,000 pounds.
It drew 12 submissions and one of them was right.
British comedian, writer and crossword author John Finnemore stumbled across Cain’s Jawbone just before the pandemic hit.
Finnemore spent about four months during lockdown working to solve the novel, laying out its pages across a spare bed in his home. He religiously Googled anything and everything referenced in the novel but remained stymied for weeks. Eventually, something clicked - although Finnemore, wary of revealing the solution, has said little about his methods.
By coincidence, it was Finnemore’s birthday when he answered a phone call from Mitchinson telling him he had gotten the answer right. Finnemore’s feat drew a buzz of media attention and reader interest, mostly in the United Kingdom, and Mitchinson decided he might as well print another round of books and open the contest again for 2021.
Almost a year later, halfway across the world in San Francisco, 25-year-old Sarah Scannell came across the novel while browsing in Green Apple Books. Scannell, who works for a documentary production company, did not buy it, thinking it would be too difficult, but a month later decided to buy a copy.
Taking advantage of an empty space in her bedroom, Scannell grouped pages by what she hoped were appropriate categories and pasted bunches of them to the wall with blue tape. She pinned yarn between pages to illustrate possible connections.
She started filming and posting her progress to TikTok, the social media platform she downloaded during the pandemic and on which she had amassed 30,000 followers. Her first video is just 15 seconds.
Within 12 hours, her video had drawn more than half a million views - and her follower count soon soared to upward of 70,000. Twenty-four hours later, the book had sold out on Amazon and was back-ordered at Green Apple Books.
Within a week, U.S. orders topped 10,000 and Canadian orders spiked to more than 3,000.
But in England, Mitchinson and Wildgust were thrilled. Eleven days after Scannell published her video, they announced plans to print 10,000 paperback copies. The following month, they printed 70,000 more - followed by additional print runs in the tens of thousands. By the end of 2022, both publishers saw thousands of pounds in profits.
At this point, I must confess: I am one of the people who fell under the novel’s spell. I downloaded a PDF of the novel onto my phone and printed out physical copies that I kept with me wherever I went. I read and reread the book everywhere: on my lunch break, during my Metro ride to work and whenever possible.
Hunting for clues, I read (almost) all of Shakespeare’s plays and checked out library books about 1930s-era London, and its notable figures. And I traversed odd crevices of the internet: One morning, I even found myself poring over an online PDF of a medieval Italian manuscript about the Catholic Church.
One day, after five months of obsessive effort, I think I may have solved the mystery. I am waiting for them to announce a 2023 contest deadline and guidelines so I can send over the email, hoping to become the next person to see if I have cracked Cain's Jawbone.
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