"Cain's Bones" - The hardest crime mystery in the world invites you to puzzle along

2023-02-02T09:50:10.897Z

The case is almost 100 years old. Hardly anyone solved it. "Kain's Bone" is a crime thriller that invites you to join in the puzzles.

The case is almost 100 years old.

Hardly anyone solved it.

"Kain's Bone" is a crime thriller that invites you to join in the puzzles.

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In the summer of last year, "Kains Knochen" was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in a German translation.

The book itself advertises with the subtitle that it is the hardest crime mystery in the world.

It was originally published in 1934 by Edward Powys Mathers, who was then creating the

Observer

crosswords .

According to the publisher, the puzzle has only been solved by three people so far.

Reason enough to start looking for the perpetrator and the motive.

Torquemada "Cain's Bones": About the Book

Torquemada "Cain's Bones" - the hardest crime mystery in the world

"Cain's Bones" is a 100-page crime thriller in which six people die.

In order to find out who they are and who killed them, the reader must rearrange the pages of the book.

There are millions of possibilities - but only one right solution.

To date, three people have found her.

blurb / Suhrkamp

If you consider the quite clear structure of the book, in which only the right-hand pages are written on and the number of six corpses, the thriller must be quite something.

The publisher's number of pages is therefore misleading, as this can be reduced by half.

But you can't tell a good thriller by the number of pages.

As a reader, one is more interested in cheering and puzzle-solving.

However, this works very well with the booklet.

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Anyone who now thinks that one can simply devour “Cain's Bones” casually, perhaps in the evening before going to bed, will have to look around quite a bit.

The arranged pages of the book are not printed in the correct order.

In the mind of the reader who is puzzling along, these should be rearranged in order to track down the culprit.

In purely mathematical terms, however, there are many ways to rearrange 100 pages.

The author himself reveals in the foreword that it is "extremely difficult and not for the faint-hearted".

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The mess in the book is inevitable.

Names that appear incoherently in the text do not make it easy for the inclined crime reader to identify a common thread in the book and the story.

This is what makes the book so charming.

There is also a first-person narrator on each page.

But that's not helpful in any way.

Rather, it leads to even more confusion.

Was the publisher serious about the subtitle after all?

TikTok and "Cain's Bones"

BookTok is a treasure trove of book recommendations.

The American Sarah Scannell took on "Cain's Bones" on TikTok and has been puzzling with the help of her followers ever since.

Other Internet forums are also used to discuss the progress of the investigation.

@saruuuuuuugh

Reply to @danithewitchh the amount of lectures i received about my swearing i stg #fyp #cainsjawbone #booktok #mystery

♬ original sound - sarah

The author himself, who goes by the pseudonym Torquemada, is said to have always given his family and friends difficult brain teasers to avoid small talk while eating.

After his death in 1939, the book fell into oblivion.

In 2018, John Mitchinson discovered the book and republished it as part of a crowdfunding campaign.

The new edition quickly sold out.

The German translation by Henry McGuffin is fun.

Until the end of September 2023, Suhrkamp Verlag is offering a prize of 1000 euros to anyone who puts the pages of the German edition in the right order.