About this episode

This episode explores the history and challenge of solving Cain's Jawbone, featuring insights from John Finnemore, who recently cracked the puzzle.

Before you can solve the world's hardest literary puzzle, you need to understand who built it and why. Edward Powys Mathers was a Persian poetry translator who spent thirteen years setting cryptic crosswords for the Observer under a pseudonym borrowed from history's most enthusiastic torturer. In 1934 he published Cain's Jawbone, a 100-page murder mystery with its pages deliberately scrambled, the numbers removed, and no instructions beyond the implication that a correct order exists. Two people solved it within a year. Then it went quiet for eight decades. In 2020, comedian and crossword compiler John Finnemore became the fourth person in history to crack it, spending four months of lockdown underlining nearly every sentence before finding the breakthrough that made the architecture visible. He swore to keep the solution secret. He has. This episode profiles the man who built the trap and the man who finally beat it, then I walk into chapter two of the puzzle live on camera. Four correct solutions in ninety years. I'm attempting the fifth in public. Solving Cain's Jawbone is a real-time investigation into the most difficult literary puzzle ever published. New episodes as the…

People in this episode

Host: ben cardall

Guest: John Finnemore

Topics covered

• literary puzzle
• crossword
• murder mystery
• real-time investigation
• history

Keywords

• Cain's Jawbone
• Edward Powys Mathers
• John Finnemore
• literary puzzle
• crossword
• murder mystery
• cryptic crosswords
• real-time investigation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Observer

Books & works: Cain's Jawbone

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