Listen to this episode and get more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/solvitude
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, shake up language until it separates into solid and liquid
Here we are, still cavorting in the Word Play series - lovely to hear from so many of you who enjoyed hearing from all the crossword constructors last episode, this episode is about what happens when crossword constructors really go big on making a cryptic puzzle that can take months or years to solve.
Next time, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be reporting to you from the Scripps Spelling Bee! For real time bee reports, follow me on the socials and members of the Allusioverse will be getting pretty much running commentary while I’m there, so head to theallusionist.org/donate if you’d like that too.
On with the show.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Hello, I'm John Finnemore. I'm a writer, a comedian, and an actor. I write mostly comedy, mostly for radio, but also TV and film. And I have just written a thing that's extremely hard to categorise: it's not really a book, it's a puzzle, it's also a murder mystery, and it comes in the form of a box of a hundred picture postcards with text on one side and pictures on the other.
HZ: I mean, now you describe it like that, it is quite hard to categorise.
JOHN FINNEMORE: People are saying, “What’s the new thing you’re working on?” “OK, sit down. In 1934…”
HZ: Okay, alright, yeah. Let's start in 1934. In 1934...?
JOHN FINNEMORE: Yes, in 1934, a man called Edward Powys Mathers, who was better known at the time by his pseudonym of Torquemada, as in the Spanish Inquisitor, he was the crossword editor of The Observer, and he more or less invented the British style cryptic crossword where you have a definition part of the clue and then a word play part to the clue.
HZ: There's a clue in the clue as to how to approach the clue. We Brits love not saying what we mean directly. Born in 1892 in England, Edward Powys Mathers didn't invent cryptic crossword clues, but he was a pioneer in using only cryptic clues in his crosswords, and making them doublethinkier. He published more than 600 of his challenging word puzzles, and reviewed detective fiction on the side. Then in 1934 he published a gigantic puzzle combining both interests in The Torquemada Puzzle Book: A Miscellany of Original Crosswords, Acrostics, Anagrams, Verbal Pastimes and Problems, Etc, Etc. & Cain's Jawbone: A Torquemada Mystery Novel. Long title but that's just to warm you up for the endeavours within.
JOHN FINNEMORE: The first half was his crosswords and other word games. And the second half was - well, it was a hundred-page novella, but the pages were printed in a random order. And the aim of the puzzle, what the puzzler had to do was first work out what the correct order of the pages was, and then even when you do that it remains a very cryptic elusive text. And they then had to work out details of six murders told in that story, who'd killed who.
HZ: Unusual for a book to come with pages that you're meant to take out and rearrange.
JOHN FINNEMORE: It was a very unusual book. I've got a copy of the original here that I can show you. [Rustles pages] It starts with the crosswords. Then you have the crossword answers. Then you have the various other word games. Then, this is the page that explains the rules, then you have the hundred pages that you're supposed to cut out and rearrange, with a section for notes. And then, what I particularly enjoy about it, is at the end, he included some transparent paper, which you were meant to cut out and used so that more than one person could do the crosswords.
HZ: That's so considerate. He's thinking about future generations. Is that an original copy?
JOHN FINNEMORE: Yes it is,
HZ: It's in lovely condition. And no one has taken the pages out of that one and rearranged it.
JOHN FINNEMORE: No, people have had a go at a few of the crosswords, but no one seems to have attempted the puzzle.
HZ: This 100-page cryptic puzzle/murder mystery novella Cain's Jawbone, came with a cash prize back in 1934, for the first person who sent the publishers the correct solution by post. Which, in 1935, three people did - and two, Mr Saxon Arnold Sydney-Turner and Mr William Kennedy, received prize money of £25 each, because their letters containing the solution arrived on the same day, and it seemed unfair to award the prize to the person who had happened to have their letter opened first. But the solution remained a secret, it was never published; then Edward Powys Mathers died a few years later, in 1939, and Cain's Jawbone was largely forgotten about.
Until 2019: a copy of the Torquemada Puzzle Book had made its way to Shandy Hall, the museum in the North Yorkshire house that had been occupied in the 1760s by Laurence Stern, the author of the quixotic novel Tristram Shandy. Shandy Hall's curator Patrick Wildgust decided to try to solve Cain's Jawbone, and even managed to track down the official solution, in a letter Edward Powys Mathers had sent to someone who had submitted their incorrect answer to the puzzle. In collaboration with the publisher Unbound, Cain's Jawbone was republished in September 2019, in the form of a box of 100 postcards, which is how John Finnemore got hold of it.
JOHN FINNEMORE: I got the box of postcards because I'm a crossword solver and setter and this was seem to right up my street. And I had a look through them and I quickly decided that I didn't really have the first idea, and that this was beyond me, and I certainly didn't have the time to give it the proper consideration that it would need.
HZ: Even though Unbound was offering a prize of £1000 to the first person to send in the correct solution! But getting there takes a lot of application.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Shall I read you a short piece to give people an idea of what we're talking about? Here we go. Okay.
"It flashed through my mind that the place between Eros and the Queen's Hall had been horribly changed since Orpen painted it in 1912. Also, that even if I took the warnings of the Ming and got there instantaneously, my modest Munich would have to bracket at my expense with islands more commonly known as Ifate."
So it's that sort of nonsense. And then you have to work out all of those references, and then work out how they fit together to form a narrative, and then work out who murdered who. In that example, we've got Google, so it's fairly easy to look up the place between Eros and Queen's Hall that Orpen painted in 1912 is a restaurant called the Café Royale in London.
But what you can't look up is “the warnings of the Ming”, because that doesn't mean anything. You have to work out that this narrator uses spoonerisms a lot of the time, and what they mean is the wings of the morning. And “the wings of the morning” I know is a biblical phrase from one of the Psalms that means ‘instantly’. So she's saying, “even if I got there instantly, my modest Munich would have to bracket at my expense with islands more commonly known as Ifate.” That means her modest Munich is a slang for a lager and they would have to bracket these islands commonly known because those are the Sandwich Islands.
So what she's saying is even if she got to the Café Royale now, she would still have to buy sandwiches to go with her beer. And in order to understand that, you need to know that in the 1930s, the licensing laws in London meant that different areas of London had different rules about when you could buy a drink and when you couldn't. And in this case, the Café Royal was in a part of London that meant that at ten o'clock you could only buy beer if you also bought something to eat. So that tells you that this page must be written at going on ten o'clock, which helps you fit it in with the other pages that are written that day, and the thing with the spoonerism tells you who is probably speaking. So that's what's going on. But there's a hundred pages of that. And that was only a quarter of a page.
HZ: So four hundred of that and you're really getting somewhere.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Well yes. And a lot of it is quotations, and he doesn't always tell you he's quoting. That's part of the puzzle, is you've got to recognize, "Oh, that's Browning, so it must be the character who likes Browning." Which, now, again, Google, you can put in something that looks suspiciously poetic and go, oh right, Walt Whitman. But then you would just have had to have known, I suppose; you just have had to be so well read that you could spot a Whitman or a Browning quotation, just cold-reading it. So I'm in awe of the three people who did it without Google. But then again, what they had that they at least were living in the 1930s, so the topical references to licensing laws or tennis players or things like that, they had a small advantage there. But I'd still rather be solving it post internet than in 1934.
HZ: When he first got his copy of Cain's Jawbone, in late 2019, John didn't spend very long trying to solve the puzzle.
JOHN FINNEMORE: I had a look, read something like that, thought, "Oh, I don't know. Maybe if I had all the time in the world - but I don't have all the time in the world." Then there was a pandemic and I had all the time in the world. So, yeah, it was my little lockdown project. I spread it out on a bed and would potter up in the evening and just sort of tinker with a few pages.
HZ: Wow. So while the rest of us were growing spring onions from stubs, you were solving a hundred page cryptic puzzle.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Ha! It was a really enjoyable thing to do.
HZ: What was fun about it?
JOHN FINNEMORE: It's a slow release of not understanding something for ages and then eventually having to come at it from a different direction or putting other pages together that then throw a light on the thing that you've been chewing over forever. And so it's got that delayed gratification and constant little serotonin hits all the way through. I think the full story when I say I looked at it and thought, “That's too hard for me,” is I looked at it and I thought, well, it's clearly very hard and I don't trust whether this is doable after all this time, and I don't know whether to trust the puzzle maker, because the cryptic crosswords are - because he kind of more or less invented them, they're a lot looser and weirder then, and I thought if he's playing as fast and loose with this as he does with his crosswords, then I probably won't be able to solve it after all this time.
But in fact I was wrong. It's a really well constructed puzzle, and as with most well constructed puzzles there is a moment when - well, there are a few sort of steps of revelation, but there's one in particular, there's a realization you make, that makes you say, "I don't know the answer but I can see how I'm supposed to do this now. Now I know what to do next." And then when you've done that bit again, there's there's a realization of "Oh, I see." So for instance in that page I just gave you, I said about the times of the day, so every page in that section has a reference to the hour of the day, however cryptic; so I know those pages are in the right order because I've decrypted all the references to the hours and that's how they fit. And it's also hard to spend an hour on it without making some progress, so you don't get too frustrated by it, because even if you've only swapped the order of two pages or worked out someone's surname, you feel that your time's being well spent.
HZ: And after six months, and with there being tens of millions of possible combinations of these 100 pages, John thought he had found the one correct solution.
HZ: How did you feel when you got to the solution? Were you sure that that was the one?
JOHN FINNEMORE: I was mostly sure. By the end I was pretty sure that I got it except for, I think, three pages. There's one page I just wasn't sure of and two pages that could I felt could go in either order within their section. I've since realized what I was missing about the two that I wasn't sure about, by the way. He says in his introduction to it that the readers should be reassured that there is only one possible order. And he's right, it doesn't make sense in [the other way], because of his careful construction. I was confident that I'd worked out the story, and pretty confident of the page order, but there was room for doubt. But, eventually I worked it out. And it turned out I was the only one who did it, who got the complete correct solution.
HZ: Big cash prize! What did you spend it on?
JOHN FINNEMORE: A piano.
HZ: Lovely.
JOHN FINNEMORE: A piano because I thought, I want to spend that all on one thing, so I can look at that piano and go, oh yeah, that's from that strange year of the pandemic and Cain's Jawbone.
HZ: The thing about pianos as well is just they lay it all out. They're like, “Look, here's some octaves. Do what you want,” rather than “Gotta figure out how to use me!”
JOHN FINNEMORE: The opposite of Cain's Jawbone. So I did that and then. And then I sort of forgot about it
HZ: But the Cain's Jawbone revival was about to really take off. In 2021, Unbound published more copies in paperback book form, and in San Francisco one of them was bought by Sarah Scannell, who covered her bedroom walls with the pages and posted on TikTok about her progress with the puzzle. And like countless dances and poaching chicken in NyQuil, TikTok spawned a trend.
JOHN FINNEMORE: And so the book really took off and sold very well in America and then, because that had done so well, foreign publishers were interested in it. But the trouble was the original publisher, they knew the right order, but they didn't know why - the publishers hadn't solved the puzzle themselves. So when the translator was asking how to translate that stuff about Munich or sandwiches or whatever, they couldn't tell them; the only person they knew who could was me. So I had a weird job of being a sort of consultant to translators where they would Zoom or email me long lists of of questions about what was going on, I'd do my best to parse it for them.
HZ: This seems like a really difficult translation job, because cryptic clues, you can't necessarily translate them directly because the crypticism might not carry.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Yes. Surprisingly, given his job and what he was famous for, there aren't that many cryptic crossword style pieces of wordplay in it, but there's all sorts of other wordplay and also slang references and you know englishisms, but 1930s englishisms or americanisms. I can't imagine how the poor translators did it, but they did.
HZ: Once you've solved it, does it work as a novella? And out of order, how does it work as a novella?
JOHN FINNEMORE: If you just read it through in the printed random order, then it just seems like it's impossible that this could mean anything. It makes no sense at all. It's so strange and elusive and goes off on so many tangents. There are nonetheless distinguishable characters and as I say, a couple of nice jokes. As a novella, in the right order, if the story was retold in plain language, I don't think you'd quite say that it works. But it does work under its own terms. it's a ridiculous, complicated thing he's trying to - well, he succeeds in making.
Meanwhile, I was sort of wishing I had another one to do, because he never wrote a puzzle in that format again. He kind of invented the cryptic crossword and the Cain's Jawbone mismatched novel puzzle, and he wrote hundreds of the first and one of the second, so no one's ever done it since. There's no others to have a go at. Anyway, I've written one. I've tried to write my own.
HZ: Well, you did it.
JOHN FINNEMORE: I've done it.
HZ: You didn't try; you did.
JOHN FINNEMORE: I tried, and then I failed, and then I kept on trying, and then eventually I did it. It's called The Researcher's First Murder.
HZ: So there's sequels planned?
JOHN FINNEMORE: No. No. It was incredibly hard to do. I find writing very difficult, but I do crossword setting for fun, as relaxation. It seems to come from a different part of my mind. So I thought, oh, maybe it comes from that part. And it turns out it does. It was much more enjoyable to write than most of what I write. But it was just really, really difficult.
And I had decided that the moment I knew I wanted to do it was when I had the idea of this time making them postcards. Because if Cain's Jawbone, if there's anything wrong with it, it's that apparent unscaleability when you look at it, it seems utterly impenetrable and you don't know where to start. I've met a lot of people who bought the book and then just haven't really got anywhere with it. And that seems a bit of a shame. So I thought with the postcards, I can have exactly the same format on the text side, a hundred pages, out of order, put them together, tell a story, tell me who murdered - I've done ten murders this time, so who murders who, ten times over.
HZ: “‘I've done ten murders’ - John Finnemore.” Very incriminating.
JOHN FINNEMORE: I've done ten murders! Hahaha!
HZ: I’m going to take that out of context and play it to the police.
JOHN FINNEMORE: But on the other side, I've got these pictures and they fall very obviously into ten sets of ten. And they are standalone puzzles that have their own answer. The answers feed into the main narrative, but you can just do them entirely separately. My ideal is that everyone will get somewhere and very few people will solve absolutely everything, i. e. the whole text side correctly and all ten of the puzzles. The thing about the picture puzzles is you have to kind of work out how on earth this is a puzzle. "This appears to be ten pictures of various statues and artworks or stained glass windows with animals holding shields with letters on, what am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to do now?" I find that kind of thing fun, so I hope others will too. I've tried to make them as different types of puzzle as I can. So, whatever the particular kind of puzzle you like, or the kind of strength you have, there'll be one that's up your street, at least one. What I want to do is replicate that feeling I had when I got the the breakthrough I was talking about of going, Oh, I'm in safe hands. This person knows what they're doing. I can spend more time on this and I won't be disappointed, even if I can't solve it.
HZ: Did you feel like you had to internet-proof it to some extent? Because I know people were like trying to use algorithms to solve the old one and it actually didn't work.
JOHN FINNEMORE: No, I don't think you could use an algorithm to solve mine. Yes, the internet existing changes it entirely. Now, my puzzle has all sorts of strange obscure stuff in it, and I couldn't have written it without the internet and I don't imagine that it's solvable without it either, so anyone who does have a go at it is encouraged to search for stuff early and often, because that's part of the way to solve it. But everything, however obscure, it's always available from at least two sources in a way that I think will always be available. And you don't need to know it beforehand. You just need to be clever about working out where to find it.
And then there are other things: I don't use spoonerisms for instance, but that wings of the morning/warnings of the Ming is a good example of something that isn't Googleable. I mean it might be now, because I think a few people have put solutions up, but when I was doing it, there was no way to work out what that meant except the way he intended. And there's there are a few tricks I've played like that. So it's not internet-proof indeed - as I say it, encourages us all to use the internet - but I don't think you can do it just with the internet; I think you do also have to have a human intelligence there as well.
HZ: As someone who sets and solves puzzles, what to you makes a particularly satisfying puzzle?
JOHN FINNEMORE: Well, it's the same as what makes a satisfying murder mystery, the ideal is that when you finally get it/are told it by the detective or look up the solution, the reaction should be, "Oh yes, I should have got that. I say, well, that makes perfect sense. That's inevitable and right and well constructed. And I was nearly there, but Poirot got there first." Even a good crossword clue is when you finally managed to forget about the surface, by which I mean what the cryptic clue appears to mean, and it can be so hard to divorce yourself from that, and then when you realise the answer you should go, "Oh yes, of course."
HZ: It seems challenging to find the balance between it being hard enough to solve that it's intriguing, but not so hard that people give up straight away, because it sounds like a lot of people were turned off Cain's Jawbone because it was so daunting.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Yes, exactly. And it's very hard to measure how hard a puzzle is. My puzzles are usually harder than I think, it turns out, both this and crossword puzzles I set. I think, I hope, that once you work it out, it can only go in one order; I hope there's more than - in fact I'm fairly sure there's more than - one way to go about it. But, I need to make sure that there is at least one, and I know how I expect it to be solved. So that was a lot of the work, and a lot of the fun was creating that path towards ordering them that I expect people to follow. And then I'm hoping that when people actually start to do it, they'll do it in ways that completely surprise me. And I won't know until it's published.
HZ: What would make you happier: if nobody solves it or if lots of people solve it?
JOHN FINNEMORE: Oh, lots of people, without question. I hope it's not trivial, but any puzzle has failed if nobody solves it, somebody said about crosswords that you have a battle, but the setter’s aim should be to lose the battle. The setter wants an infuriated, frustrated, but ultimately successful solver. And that's what I want with this as well. Partly because I'm really proud of it and people to see the whole thing. That was an odd feeling actually, there were times when I was thinking, "I'm putting all of this effort into this. How many people are ever going to actually understand what this page means, that I've spent all this time on?" I don't know. We'll see. We might get thousands of right entries. I'd be surprised if we didn't get any. That would be awful. But I don't think that will happen.
HZ: And there's a £1,000 prize for solving.
JOHN FINNEMORE: There is, yes, yeah.
HZ: If you solve the researcher's first murder and stop the researcher doing another one.
JOHN FINNEMORE: That's right.
HZ: Do you have the solution somewhere heavily guarded?
JOHN FINNEMORE: Yes, only I have it at the moment. I have it in the program that I wrote it in, even the publisher doesn't have it yet because they don't need it.
HZ: Oh, I hope you've got a backup!
JOHN FINNEMORE: Ah, that's a good point. I'm not sure I have. I suppose I have it on more than one device. We were talking about how hard it was to translate Cain's Jawbone. This, for various reasons, would be I think impossible to translate in its current form. So what I'm doing now is working on a version of it, that's not exactly the same story that is translatable. And so that will be published in some countries, I think, the year later.
HZ: Wow, the international edition.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Yes. Yeah.
HZ: Same solution, different journey?
JOHN FINNEMORE: Different solution, but same idea. So it's not like it's a new book, but I have changed the solution otherwise either one would be a crib to the other. If you happen to speak two languages.
HZ: So polyglots have got multiple puzzles to solve. Lucky them.
JOHN FINNEMORE: Well, yeah, we'll see. That one will just come out as a normal paperback, that won't be the box of postcards, because one of the things that would be very hard to translate, if not impossible, is some of the picture puzzles.
HZ: Do you have a warning to people, not exactly a warning, but a request, like when you see The Mousetrap and they ask you not to tell people the denouement, do you have anything like that to stop people just blabbing?
JOHN FINNEMORE: No, because I suppose I hope that people don't. Actually, people were very good about Cain's Jawbone. I think it was a long time before - I mean, people have now. The solution is up on the net now, you can just look it up, but it took a long time for that to happen. And I don't think any of the first round people did give it away, because the publishers asked us nicely not to. So, hopefully, that's all it will take this time as well; but it won't last forever, it'll be on the internet eventually.
HZ: People should enjoy the journey, not just the destination, right?
JOHN FINNEMORE: I've been giving some giveaways, obviously, in this chat, but that's because the solution has been breached for so long. And also because I've just picked a couple of things from Cain to spoil. There's still so much left unspoiled.
HZ: Yeah, I think it might save people maybe ten minutes rather than rush them to the solution immediately.
JOHN FINNEMORE: That little bit that I parsed for you: it's not going to give away the whole thing, and it won't really help anyone who hasn't made quite a lot of headway.
HZ: As the first 21st century solver of Cain's Jawbone, I believe you were entitled to be in a Cain's Jawbone club and to go to the Cain's Jawbone conference. Did you participate in either of those?
JOHN FINNEMORE: I did. Yes, I did. I didn't know about the club until I got there. But yes, anyone who'd submitted a correct solution by last summer was invited to Shandy Hall, and we had a lovely day in the sunshine and it was lovely meeting people where you could say just, "What the hell was the story that the colonel told in Trafalgar Square? What's that got to do with anything? Has anyone worked it out?" Because there's still bits of Cain that I don't understand - not all that many now, but there are little, there are quarter pages which don't stop you putting them in the right order or knowing who did what, that I still haven't cracked.
HZ: Satisfying to think that in ninety years' time people could be gathering at The Researcher’s First Murder conference. "What was John Finnemore thinking?”
JOHN FINNEMORE: I’m really looking forward to is lurking on the boards - because people set up a lot of boards trying to collaboratively solve Cain's Jawbone, and I will absolutely be there with a pseudonym, not saying anything, or certainly not helping, but I think I will enjoy watching that process a lot.
HZ: If they're getting there too quickly, will you throw in some red herrings there?
JOHN FINNEMORE: If I can derail them? If I can think of a way, maybe I will.
HZ: John Finnemore is a comedian, actor, writer, and crossword constructor, and the author of the upcoming puzzle murder mystery book-box-of-100-cards thing - he’s right, it is difficult to describe, but it’s called The Researcher’s First Murder: A New Cain’s Jawbone Puzzle, you can preorder it now at Unbound.com.
And the annual new episode of his BBC Radio 4 comedy show John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme has just landed, you can listen to it on BBC Sounds.
I like to keep track with what alumsionists are doing, and here’s an update from Lily Sloane who appeared on the Mind My Mind episode a couple of years ago, talking about mental health words that have been incorporated into everyday vocabulary - I heard from so many of you after that episode, you loved Lily. And she’s a real multitalent: not only a therapist and a podcaster, she’s also a musician and sound artist, and she and Zara Zimbardo have just released a new musicy soundscapey project, Marsification, which is about how the destructive rich will say stuff like, “Hmm, Earth’s looking a bit of a mess, no fixing that, I’m gonna colonise Mars instead.” That, but make it beautiful, strange, funny sound art. Ooh and there’s a lot of language content in there as well. Find Marsification at Marsification.com and on Bandcamp, Soundcloud etc.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
famulus, noun, historical: an assistant or servant, especially one working for a magician or scholar.
Try using ‘famulus’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The music is by Martin Austwick of PaleBirdMusic.com.
Our ad partner is Multitude. If you want to advertise on this show, and hear me come up with an original ad for your product every time, contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads.
I’m on my way to the Scripps Spelling Bee, so if it all works out and I don’t accidentally drop all my recordings into a pool of wet cement, next episode will be all about the Bee, but for updates while I’m there, follow @allusionistshow on the social networks and get even more scoop by signing up to be a member of the Allusioverse at theallusionist.org/donate.
And you can hear or read every episode, get links to all the guests you heard from and their work and more information about the topics, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and links to any events that are coming up - thanks to everyone who came to the Vancouver meetup last weekend, it was lovely to hang out with you in the drizzle - all your allusionist information and news and most importantly podcasts live at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
