by Lilly Boneva
What is “Cain’s Jawbone”?
“Cain’s Jawbone” is a unique crime novel and puzzle book. It contains 100 pages written by Edward Powys Mathers under the pseudonym “Torquemada,” but they’re printed in a random order. The challenge is to rearrange these pages correctly to understand the story and identify six murderers and six victims. First published in 1934, the book was later “lost” and reprinted in 2019 by Unbound. Thanks to TikTok, its popularity skyrocketed during the pandemic!
When it was first published, only two solvers were officially recognized. In 2020, comedy writer and actor John Finnemore became the first person in recent times to solve it. Considering the pages can be arranged in 9.33×10^157 possible combinations, this is an incredible feat. Spoiler alert: I solved it too!
Now, I’m officially part of the Solvers Club. Although I’m not sure how many others have done it, with half a million copies sold since 2019 according to the Guardian, I’m very proud of this accomplishment.
How Did I Discover the Book?
One night, I was sitting on my best friend Dessy’s couch, sipping my favorite rum and coke. She told me about a puzzle book she saw on TikTok that she thought I’d enjoy. People were posting videos of themselves solving it by gluing pages on their walls and connecting underlined words with red thread, playing detectives. As a TikTok skeptic, I was ready to dismiss it, but I trust Desi’s taste, so I was intrigued. I was also a bit surprised that none of my usual algorithms had suggested it to me despite my love for puzzle books. It seems real friends know you better than any algorithm! Despite the challenge it posed for a non-native speaker, she ordered it right away as a present for me.
Getting Started
When the book arrived two weeks later, I felt a mix of fear and excitement. As I looked through the pages, I was surprised to see that most ended with punctuation marks, not mid-sentence as I had expected. My initial idea of matching sentence fragments was dismissed. That would have been too easy, right Torquemada? However, I noticed that a few pages had quotes or poem-like segments italicized and centered. This seemed like a good starting point, even if it would only give me six pairs of pages… Still better than nothing, I thought.
I started actually reading the text and quickly realized I need to cut out all the pages and start taking LOTS of notes. Sticky notes helped me group similar pages, but it was hard to keep track of everything. So, I went digital. I was too lazy to retype the book or scan it, so in January 2022, I found a digital copy of the book and started working with that. I looked for alternative clues, like reading the first or last letters of each line, but to no avail. Highlighting in red all the moments that seemed like a murder was happening and all the recurring names (like Henry) helped me search and rearrange the pages more easily. But I still hadn’t made almost any progress.
Solving It?
Two weeks in, I had made decent progress with many “aha” moments (I have promised to not give away methods or solutions). The book was peeling away like an onion for me as I was discovering layer after layer. I was getting more and more excited with every small breakthrough and the task looked more and more doable. Although I was still very far away from having a full solution that I could be 100% sure in, I was getting to know the author’s style, the type of clues he had planted for the reader, the ways he was giving me confirmations that I am on the right track, and getting a hang of what I need to be looking for in order to complete the puzzle.
Jumping 1 month ahead into my solving experience, I had most of it cracked, I had a solid framework to work on. Almost every sentence in the book was underlined and I knew why it was put there, but a few pages were still not clear to me or where they should go. This last part was very difficult for me – Some required obscure research that was likely common knowledge in 1934 UK, but not today. I marveled at how anyone could have solved this puzzle back then without the internet or digital tools. Still I was continuing to admire more and more Torquemada’s skills in both constructing a logical game, but also playing with language and style – the book is just a masterpiece!
Actually Solving It!
Exactly three months after my first “digital” attempt (end of April) – I was pretty satisfied with my solution, but I was unsure on the order of two-three pages. It felt like a great achievement and the journey was wonderful, but imagine that – if you put page 93 as page 3 in your solution and everything in between is now on the wrong spot, so you need to be 100% right 😀 So I “gave up” and decided not to submit an answer. But when the December deadline came (Unbound had extended the competition to the end of December 2022) I decided to submit. Soon enough I got a response that 96% of my pages were at the right spots and I had correctly identified the 6 murderers and 6 victims. Hooray!
I was telling myself that this is good enough and still a big achievement, but somehow internally I wanted to get to 100%, especially since I was lazy enough to do a final check before submitting 8 months after I thought I had solved the book. So when at the end of 2023 Unbound was accepting answers again and for a last time – I decided to try again. 96% meant that in the worst case scenario I had swapped 2 pages twice. The problem was that I did not know which ones. So I did a check and I found one very rookie mistake I had made about 2 of the pages, which was so clear that I had not ever re-checked, plus I swapped 2 pages which were part of my obscure research I was telling you about and these were bugging me until the end. It was now or never – I submitted my second attempt. And surprise – in February I received this email:
You cannot imagine the pride and sense of achievement I felt – I was calling my friend Dessy who bought me the book because she saw it on TikTok, I was sending Discord messages to my puzzle hunt group, telling friends over dinner that I solved “the world’s most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle”! I felt like Sherlock Holmes breaking his hardest case (or 6 cases to be exact). Here are the certificate and pin I received:
Lessons Learned
What I learned (or at least reconfirmed for myself) is that I have the perseverance to spend months on this daunting and exciting task, not being a native speaker, not living in the UK, but determined to “play the game”. Somebody had said that puzzles are games designed by their writer at which they want you to beat them and have fun. And Torquemada has designed one hell of a game, which deserves a spot in every puzzler’s library! I was thinking about how much time, effort, and work has gone into the construction of this brilliant puzzle! The only spoiler I would give to you, which only displays how genius the book is – for every page you put in the right place you have not one, but two confirmations that it is right. Which makes the puzzle highly logical and results in the fact that once you have solved it – you know for sure you have solved it, without even needing external confirmation. I also learned that whenever I know how to do something I lose interest in doing it – hence one of my initial errors, which I could have easily avoided by re-checking my work even once.
Starting Your Own Journey
If you want to deep-dive into solving this mystery yourself – you can grab a copy from Amazon (I bought myself another copy, so that I have one which is not cut) and/or join the numerous online communities tackling the book together on reddit, discord, etc. (something I avoided, since to me it defeats the purpose). And also – you can try the sequel. A sequel? Wait, what? How is this possible as the book is 90 years old already? The first “modern” solver- British comedian and crossword compiler John Finnemore has spent 2 years creating a puzzle of his own inspired by the Cain’s Jawbone book. The Researcher’s First Murder: A New Cain’s Jawbone Puzzle is now available for pre-order and soon will be available on Amazon. I have already pre-ordered it and I am so eager to try it. Unbound is also offering £1000 as a prize for the 1st person to successfully solve the 100 postcards puzzle within 6 months of publication.
The game is afoot!
