a b c Flood, Alison (10 November 2020). "Literary puzzle solved for just third time in almost 100 years". The Guardian . Retrieved 11 November 2020. This is, as the box says, "not for the faint hearted". You will need to research, think outside the box, be open to scrunching up your pet theories and tossing them into the trash, and occasionally walking around in public berating yourself like a loon when you have a moment of revelation while on the tram. If all of this sounds worthwhile to you (i.e. like me, you have no life), what are you waiting for?

Update: Versions of Cain's Jawbone created by the Reddit community can now be found on GitHub at https://github.com/tn3rt/cains-jawbone. Then, in the summer of 2018, on a trip to visit his father in North Yorkshire, Unbound’s co-founder and publisher John Mitchinson dropped in on the Lawrence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall in Coxwold. JB Priestley called Shandy Hall the “mediaeval house where the modern novel was born”, referring to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the 1759 precursor to the “stream of consciousness” that would be the mark of literary modernism in the 20th century. 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.It is impossible to describe the plot of Cain’s Jawbonebecause it is not a lucid, linear narrative. It’s a quasi-stream of consciousness tale, told from the perspective of an unknown (at least at first) number of narrators, stuffed to the bursting point with literary and historical references. The contemporary player has a huge advantage over those who tried to solve the mystery in the 1930’s, as the Internet allows people who do not have the same breadth of general knowledge as Mathers to look up important facts and references. 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. But if you want to know even more and/or read about interesting references I can totally recommend following articles:

She’s searching for not one murderer, but as many as six. And unlike most investigators, Scannell is starting with a daunting handicap: She doesn’t even know who the victims are. Before Edward Powys Mathers wrote the world's most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle, he was a cryptic crossword creator. Compiled under his pseudonym, 'Torquemada', his puzzles would taunt readers for days. He created his first cryptic crossword puzzle in 1924 and went on to set them for the Saturday Westminster and the Observer for the next fifteen years. 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”.

Overall, the online community did a terrific job of making sense of this puzzle (my contributions are limited *). Only the one of John Finnemore, a British comedy writer and crossword setter, held the correct answer. The funny thing is that he told The Guardian: “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.”

It came from Geoffrey Day, who is a Trustee of the Laurence Sterne Trust and a Sterne scholar. He had had the book for years but had not been able to solve the puzzle. a b Carpani, Jessica; Goldsbrough, Susannah (4 November 2020). "British comedian solves world's 'most difficult literary puzzle' becoming third winner in 100 years". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 11 November 2020. I expected it to be confusing, but I don’t think I really anticipated how hard it would be to understand language from the 1930s,” Scannell tells Mental Floss. Google is helpful, of course, but often the challenge lies in knowing what to google. Scannell suspects that she’s missed clues that are hidden in plain sight, simply because the nearly-90-year-old British English is so foreign to her that she doesn’t recognize them as clues at all. “There are plenty examples of language and social standards that you, as a reader, are expected to just know—things that a contemporary reader wouldn’t even consider as part of the challenge,” Scannell says. “So this impossible puzzle gets even harder as it ages.”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?’ Cain's Jawbone is a murder mystery puzzle written by Edward Powys Mathers under the pseudonym " Torquemada". The puzzle was first published in 1934 as part of The Torquemada Puzzle Book. In 2019, crowdfunding publisher Unbound published a new stand-alone edition of the puzzle in collaboration with the charity The Laurence Sterne Trust. The novel is narrated in the first person throughout but my big suspicion is that it contains multiple first person narrators. I think there are about five narrators, I also think that two of them might be called Henry and one of those Henrys is a dog. I was suspicious a few times. I came across Cain’s Jawbone for the first time when I was a small child, in love with puzzles and books and trying to find ways to clash the two together to fulfill my own dreams of being a detective. Wildgust confirmed that Finnemore’s solution was correct. He himself set out to solve Cain’s Jawbone first by typing out the entire novel, making a note of every literary reference he could find. This didn’t work. Then he searched libraries for copies of the book to see if any contained markings to help him. None did, but eventually he managed to find the answer.

As well as being a writer and cruciverbalist, Powys Mathers was also a translator, responsible for an edition of The Thousand and One Nights in the 1920s, as well as other books. A new challenge from creator and publisher behind the viral sensation Cain's Jawbone: A Very Novel Mystery.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. explanation of the meaning of “the Knight” in Paul Trinder’s narration( 9); notes about Bill’s narration (a technique to name fictional characters similar to the one used by modern cryptographists); demonstration that epea pteroenta and ephphatha may have been chosen for their proximity in Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary of English Language rather than their definition ( 75) ; Henry the dog loves to play with eyeballs ( 36, 71, 91). A custom program to cross-reference Cain’s Jawbone against almost 70,000 books in the public domain to detect hidden quotes The subreddit /r/CainsJawbone and its related sources (documents linked to posts, etc.). The majority of the comments come from this source.