Cracking ‘Cain’s Jawbone,’ a 1934 murder mystery with pages printed out of order
“Cain’s Jawbone” is seductive. The lissome little murder mystery retails for $15 and totals 100 pages. The novel’s cover, depicting a murdered man’s legs on a library floor, is an enticing blend of turquoise, bright yellow and pale orange. The book was written in 1934 by a British crossword master, and “the pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order,” the book jacket’s cover declares, “but it is possible — through logic and intelligent reading — to sort them into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers.”
Just 100 pages? How hard could it be?
Then you start reading — and realize why only four people have solved the puzzle since its publication nearly eight decades ago.
“I stabbed once,” declares page 38, “and even as I did so, I thought of skinny old Marat in his slipper bath, the nightcap about his forehead, the dim light of the candle, the shadow at the door, the stealthy tread of Charlotte Brontë with the undulled blade.”
“Had not the author of Wails of a Tayside Inn said of them that they were the living poems and that all the rest were dead?” asks page 93. “Had not the singer of Wimpole Street said that they were binding up their hearts away from breaking with a cerement of the grave?”
And yet the long-ignored novel is witnessing an unexpected explosion of puzzle-solving popularity. It began when two Englishmen unearthed the text and decided to republish it in 2019; about a year later, a crossword author managed to become the fourth person in history to come up with the correct solution.
That earned a smidgen of media coverage — but things really took off when a TikTok user in San Francisco picked the slim volume up at her local bookstore and started posting videos about her attempts to solve it. Her first video, published in November 2021 and titled “i fear i may have girl bossed a bit too close to the
sun,” earned 6.6 million views. Within hours, “Cain’s Jawbone” sold out on Amazon.
The craze has continued: As of early December, the book has sold 325,000 copies and is being translated into 12 languages, according to John Mitchinson, one of the two Britons who discovered the text and who printed it through his crowdfunded publishing company, Unbound.
The novel has united people around the world in an obsessive quest to unearth the answer, generating online communities, prompting many to turn rooms of their homes into “murder walls” plastered with book pages — and inspiring one woman in Colorado to propose an artificial intelligence- based method for solving the novel, which is still in the trial phase.
“It’s been a bestseller in Italy, it’s selling incredibly well in France,” Mitchinson said. “I am still just baffled that it’s selling in these quantities.”
Added Patrick Wildgust, curator of a literary museum in York who partnered with Mitchinson to republish “Cain’s Jawbone”: “This has hit home. I don’t know why.”