Signing off a 70,000-copy reprint is not something most independent publishers get to do every day, but Cain’s Jawbone isn’t a normal kind of book. The world’s most difficult literary puzzle appeared in 1934 and lay forgotten until 2019 when Unbound, the crowd-funding publishing company I co-founded, re-issued it.
Five weeks ago, a video posted by San Francisco-based TikTok creator Sarah Scannell, in which she had pasted pages of the book all over the wall of her bedroom, went viral. At the last count, her posts have been viewed more than nine million times. Bookshops on- and offline sold out immediately. Offers for translation rights flooded in. A long list of newspapers and radio interview slots were booked. A huge reprint to get the book back in shops for Christmas was signed off. That most elusive of all publishing phenomena had happened: the unexpected, inexplicable bestseller.
Cain’s Jawbone is the work of Edward Powys Mathers (better known as “Torquemada”), the man who turned the setting of crosswords into an art form. Mathers made his name as a translator of poetry from the Middle and Far East – much of it erotic – and his edition of the Arabian Nights is still widely read and admired. In the early 1920s, he became obsessed with the newly imported American craze for “cross-words” and rapidly developed his own setting style, which involved clues written in rhyming couplets. These clues often required a deep knowledge of history and literature and although Mathers wasn’t the first to deploy cryptic clues, he was the first to create crosswords that used nothing else. His puzzles combined unmatched difficulty with quirky humour and soon won him a cult following. Between 1926 and his death in 1939, Mathers produced 670 crosswords for the Observer newspaper, adopting for himself the name of the Grand Inquisitor of medieval Spain, Torquemada.
The ultimate expression of Mather’s genius was The Torquemada Puzzle Book, published by Victor Gollancz in 1934. As well as appropriately challenging crosswords, the book contained spooneristics, verbal games, telacrostics, triple cricket acrostics and anagrams – enough linguistic fun to keep a bored family occupied for weeks.
The last hundred pages of the book contained a novella, Cain’s Jawbone, dedicated to Dorothy L Sayers, the doyenne of the detective novel, in which the reader is invited to solve six murders. Unfortunately, the book’s pages had been printed “in an entirely haphazard and incorrect order, a fact which reflects little credit on somebody”.
The reader was then reassured with almost sadistic insouciance that, despite this mistake, “there is an inevitable order, the one in which the pages were written, and that, while the narrator’s mind may flit occasionally backwards and forwards in the modern manner, the narrative marches on relentlessly and unequivocally, from the first page to the last”. The challenge was to reassemble the pages in the correct order and so solve the murders.
The difficulty of this book-length puzzle is attested to by the fact that only two people solved it at the time. On a good week, Torquemada’s crossword might get several thousand correct entries. Cain’s Jawbone was of a different order of difficulty – this was no shuffled Ngaio Marsh – it was the work of a master puzzle-setter at the top of his game. Only six of the hundred pages end in mid-sentence and spoonerisms, puns and recondite poetry (much of it invented by Mathers) add to the shoal of red herrings he unleashes into the story. It may not be impossible, but it is very, very difficult (the number of possible page combinations is a number with 158 digits).
The Torquemada Puzzle Book soon fell out of print, and its author’s most fiendish puzzle passed out of public consciousness, to lie in wait – like Tolkien’s One Ring – until, eight decades later, it was brought to the attention of the one person in with an odd enough cross-section of interests to recognise its value.
Patrick Wildgust is the live-in curator of the Shandy Hall Museum in North Yorkshire, the place where Laurence Sterne, the 18th-century Irish-born novelist, wrote most of his puzzle-filled masterpiece, Tristram Shandy. Unlike most literary houses, Shandy Hall is the opposite of a mausoleum. The Laurence Sterne Trust runs an active programme of exhibitions by contemporary artists and writers inspired by Sterne’s work, and it has amassed an extensive library of experimental literature.
When a private book collector donated a copy of The Torquemada Puzzle Book to the museum’s collection, Wildgust was intrigued and like many before and since, he tried and failed to crack the Cain’s Jawbone code. His interest piqued, he activated his extensive network of literary spies to see if a solution existed anywhere. The internet proved a dead end but eventually, in true Golden Age style, a combination of spadework, luck and a cache of mislaid papers finally yielded a credible solution.
This is where I enter the story. Shandy Hall is a favourite trip out for my elderly father, who lives nearby. After tea and cake in the Garden Room, Patrick and I hatched a plan to crowdfund a rerelease of Cain’s Jawbone through Unbound and to reinstate Mather’s original competition, bumping the prize money up from £25 to £1,000.
In October 2020, the comedy writer and puzzle-fiend John Finnemore became only the third person to solve the puzzle unaided and claimed the prize. Such was its difficulty, he was only able to solve it because of lockdown. “I swiftly concluded that 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. Unfortunately, the universe heard me,” he told the Guardian.
We all agreed to keep the solution a secret and reprinted the book as a paperback earlier this year. Then TikTok happened and here we are. Those who are mad or game enough to attempt it, have until September 19th, 2022, to send in their solution.
I’m reminded of Ezra Pound’s old dictum about literature being “news that stays new”. Cain’s Jawbone isn’t new, it may not be literature, but it is, for the time being at least, still news.
John Mitchinson is the co-founder of Unbound. Cain's Jawbone is published by Unbound (£9.99) and available from all good bookshops, or direct from unbound.com The Laurence Sterne Trust is at laurencesternetrust.org.uk
