Cain's Jawbone: My Descent Into Madness

If there’s one thing that you need to know about me, it’s that I love puzzles. Whether it’s the aquarium jigsaw I was obsessed with as an eight year old or the crossword and sudoku books that now litter my nightstand (and floor and bookshelf), I can’t get enough of them, especially the satisfaction of finishing a particularly challenging one. So you can imagine how excited I was to receive Cain’s Jawbone as a Christmas present from my Dad this year. Couple that with an (arguably) serendipitously timed covid isolation and I’m set for some delightful new year’s entertainment right?

Wrong! On its cover, Cain’s Jawbone is touted as ‘The world’s most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle’ and that’s probably the best way to describe it. The aim of the game is to sort the 100 pages of the novel into the correct order, revealing the identity of the murderers and six victims. This would be a relatively straightforward, albeit time consuming, task if it weren’t for the myriad of quotations, archaic references, other languages and word games that make reading even individual pages a challenge. This book is so challenging that since it was first published in 1934 only three people have solved it, the most recent being comedy writer John Finnemore who spent six months on the puzzle. Yet my hubris (read: stupidity) tells me that yes, I shall be the fourth person ever to solve this puzzle and that yes I can do it in ten days. What follows is that attempt.

31/12/21

My first approach is to create a big grid to map out the things that each page talks about and see if I can draw any connections between places, characters, and events. This is quickly turning out to be a much more time consuming task than I anticipated, the book is full of so many obscure references, random bits of Latin, French, and I think Scots(?) that I’m spending half my time on google translate rather than actually solving a puzzle.

One surprisingly comforting thing was the strange google search recommendations I started to get based on the book. When google tells me that other people have been searching for a symbol of Irish nationalism after I google some obscure film from the 40s I feel a sense of comradery with them. Who do we think we all are trying to solve this? It’s at least nice to know that others are fighting through the fog as well.

01/01/22

Watched some tiktoks of other people trying to solve the puzzle, a popular approach seems to be using a wall to arrange the papers. I might move onto that soon but going to stick with the grid for now while I get my head around the content of the individual pages.

Ended up feeling overwhelmed and not doing much else today (other than a crossword to convince myself I’m still intelligent)

03/01/22

Working on my ‘murder grid’ has become a nightly routine at this point, my Dad sits watching one of his crime dramas on the telly and I sit agonising over Mr Hall, Will, Ben, Will’s wife, Jasmine (who I have decided definitively is not a cat), Flora, Cornelius and all of the other characters I’m trying to keep track of.

It was at this point that I truly started to lose my mind and became completely insufferable to my whole household.

06/01/22

Having been released from isolation and re-discovering the world, The Jawbone (as I’ve come to affectionately call it) still rests in the back of my mind, alongside the thought that if I just try a bit more I’ll finally crack it. The rational part of me has however come to the realisation that this just isn’t going to happen right now. With the semester fast approaching and a dissertation that already threatens my sanity, to follow Torquemada any further down this path is probably unwise both for my own health and for anyone that has to have a conversation with me.

I expected to have more of a grand takeaway after my experience with Cain’s Jawbone, something to say about the nature of puzzles and why we love them. I think everyone has their own reasons, maybe it’s loving language and word games, or being in on the secret once you’ve cracked a code. Or maybe it’s just the ego-boost that comes with being able to understand a cryptic crossword. For me it’s the feeling of getting somewhere, moving forward. There’s such a special satisfaction to having all the pieces come together at the end in the way that is so often not the case for life’s problems. This just didn’t happen with Cain’s Jawbone. The smoke is too thick and pungent to understand what’s going on and I don’t have much motivation to fight back anymore. Maybe I’ll be missing out on the glory of solving it, but at least I‘ll be having a good time with my crosswords.

Hannah Mimiec