Cain's Jawbone: A Novel Problem
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Description
Powys Mathers, who died in 1939, introduced the cryptic crossword in the UK in 1924 in the Observer newspaper under the pseudonym Torquemada. While she is reading, enter and exit respectively from her compartment: a man who is smoking a pipe, a couple of children, and Oscar Mills. With both versions within easy reach, I'm now able to fully immerse myself in this original murder mystery. A custom program to cross-reference Cain’s Jawbone against almost 70,000 books in the public domain to detect hidden quotes
John Mitchinson, publisher and co-founder of Unbound, tells me that he could not “have predicted quite how enthusiastically readers and puzzlers all over the world would embrace Cain’s Jawbone”. And that there is no one better than Finnemore, “to lay down an even more absurdly difficult challenge”. While waiting for May and interacting with her, he thinks about his acquaintances (Alexander, Barbara, Catherine). For weeks now, Scannell has been attempting to solve an excruciatingly difficult literary puzzle called Cain’s Jawbone. Written by legendary crossword innovator Edward Powys Mathers and first published in 1934, the puzzle was virtually forgotten for decades, until a chance meeting at a UK literary museum led to a 2019 reissue. The novel became popular on TikTok after Sarah Scannell, a documentary assistant in San Francisco, did a series of videos on it. Unbound reprinted 70,000 copies after the TikTok posts. My plan is to have a read through of the cards, then a read through and make some notes, then to focus more specifically on the areas suggested by the initial read throughs.It took Finnemore four months to come to the right conclusion, an achievement that he considers to be impossible nowadays without the aid of the internet. For one thing, the book is full of references to British culture and literary concerns of the 1930s that would defeat anyone today without a search engine.
The phrase Cain's Jawbone refers to the Biblical stories of Cain and Abel and Samson. [1] Puzzle [ edit ] For the time being, the former Observer man’s 87-year-old mystery remains surprisingly intact. And although there are people in reddit groups claiming to have solved it, there has been no leakage on the internet – which rather suggests they haven’t. When Finnemore first read the book he thought the challenge was “above my level”. He was ready to give up almost immediately. Although he didn’t have any children, Powys Mathers did have a nephew who is still alive. Bill Medd is now 97 and has suffered a couple of strokes, so he isn’t readily able to talk about his uncle. However Medd’s wife Julia told me that Powys Mathers wrote poems that were accompanied by “the most lovely illustrations” of lesbian figures, so maybe Scannell is on to something.
An Unofficial Solution
potential identification of the underlying explanation for the cryptic “taking off in Ireland” mentioned in an unfindable issue of the “Grundy Sapphic”( 11); explanation of “Casy Ferris” ( 1); The first time I opened the box, I swiftly concluded that it was way out of my league, and the only way I’d even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no one to see. Unfortunately, the universe heard me,” Finnemore said. May recognizes Oscar from the restaurant and guesses that he eavesdropped on her conversation with Sir Paul Trinder. when I smoke, and would not have been surprised that my Indian tobacco, after a scant four-and-twenty hours, To name Bill’s acquaintances, Edward Powys Mathers seems to have used a technique familiar to cryptographists writing scientific articles. They use fictional characters as placeholders for A, B, C, etc. Therefore, a modern cryptographist would have used Alice, Bob, and Carol/Charlie instead of Alexander, Barbara, and Catherine, but the effect is the same.
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2017/oct/30/crossword-blog-a-vintage-mystery-with-a-bizarre-twist a b "Exhibitions and events: Cain's Jawbone". The Laurence Sterne Trust. Archived from the original on 11 November 2020 . Retrieved 11 November 2020. And then there was COVID-19 and the pandemic quarantine. It took him four months to solve the puzzle. In a blog about Untitled Mystery, Finnemore said: “The picture side puzzles allow me to do two things: firstly, compensate for the arrival of the internet since 1934. You may now be able to Google an obscure Walt Whitman quotation, but you can’t Google ‘How on earth is this picture of a tree a puzzle?’
Help
Most intriguingly of all, the puzzle seems to have captured the imagination of a generation that is supposedly spoilt by technological ease. The whole thing is enough to make you stroke your jawbone and then ponder what it means that no such weapon is mentioned in the Bible, but it is in Hamlet. Hmmm, time for another read. At a certain point, I convinced myself that someone called Henry, who gets the most mentions, was in fact a dog. At others, it seemed that the sexuality of the characters was adventurously omnivorous. But essentially I hadn’t a clue. I spent several days reading the text, scratching my head, rubbing my temples, emitting quiet groans of despair, as I marked down names and what I took to be possible pointers; and I was no wiser as to what was going on than I had been at the beginning.
I wanted a version of Cain's Jawbone I could search through or maybe even try some natural language processing techniques, but there didn't appear to be a digital copy available. So I took the time to type one up myself and would like to share it with everyone.It also seems like different murders have different locations or themes. One is at a rundown London cabaret, another seems to be by the sea, another has a floral (possible poison) theme and another to be around books and poetry. Update: Versions of Cain's Jawbone created by the Reddit community can now be found on GitHub at https://github.com/tn3rt/cains-jawbone. The text has been transcribed from Mathers, E. P. (1934). The Torquemada Puzzle Book: A Miscellany of Original Crosswords, Acrostics, Anagrams, Verbal Pastimes and Problems, Etc., Etc. & Cain’s Jawbone, a Torquemada Mystery Novel. Victor Gollancz, Ltd.
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