May recognizes Oscar from the restaurant and guesses that he eavesdropped on her conversation with Sir Paul Trinder.

Little is known about the methods Mathers used to construct his puzzles. An essay written by his widow and published in a 1942 collection of Torquemada puzzles notes that he could compose a fairly simple (by his standards) crossword in about two hours, but doesn’t go into much detail about how he did it. According to Millington’s 1977 book Crosswords, Their History and Their Cult, Mathers routinely collaborated with his wife to construct puzzles; once he had decided on a puzzle’s theme and made a list of words he wanted to use, Rosemond Crowdy Mathers would often make the diagram. There are lots of literary and historical references, each of which could either be an important clue or simply a red herring. This is, as the box says, "not for the faint hearted". You will need to research, think outside the box, be open to scrunching up your pet theories and tossing them into the trash, and occasionally walking around in public berating yourself like a loon when you have a moment of revelation while on the tram. If all of this sounds worthwhile to you (i.e. like me, you have no life), what are you waiting for?Only one person succeeded: British writer, comedian, and crossword setter John Finnemore, who has since been tapped as Neil Gaiman’s co-writer on the second season of Good Omens. Finnemore initially dismissed the puzzle as too difficult for him to solve, but circumstances led him to reconsider. “The only way I'd even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no-one to see,” Finnemore told The Telegraph in 2020. “Unfortunately, the universe heard me.” Wildgust confirmed that Finnemore’s solution was correct. He himself set out to solve Cain’s Jawbone first by typing out the entire novel, making a note of every literary reference he could find. This didn’t work. Then he searched libraries for copies of the book to see if any contained markings to help him. None did, but eventually he managed to find the answer. A new challenge from creator and publisher behind the viral sensation Cain's Jawbone: A Very Novel Mystery. In 1934 he published a selection of his puzzles – crosswords, “spooneristics”, “telacrostics” and other verbal games – under the title The Torquemada Puzzle Book. a b c Cain's Jawbone – A Novel Problem . Unbound. 8 October 2019. ISBN 9781783527410 . Retrieved 11 November 2020.

But if you want to know even more and/or read about interesting references I can totally recommend following articles: As Torquemada, Mathers became a worldwide phenomenon. The Observer offered prizes for the first three correct solutions it received to each new puzzle, and competition was fierce—as many as 7000 solutions flooded the post every week. (It’s estimated that some 20,000 other crossword enthusiasts completed Mathers’s weekly puzzles but didn’t compete for the prizes.) Solutions came in from as far away as Alaska, India, and West Africa. That is until Shandy Hall, an independent literary museum in the UK operated by the Laurence Sterne Trust, received a donation of The Torquemada Puzzle Book. While she is reading, enter and exit respectively from her compartment: a man who is smoking a pipe, a couple of children, and Oscar Mills.

John Mitchinson, publisher and co-founder of Unbound said: “I wonder what Edward Powys Mathers would make of the idea of solving his fiendish book-length puzzle using artificial intelligence? My hunch is that given his own freakish ability to spot literary patterns, he would have thoroughly approved.” Update: Versions of Cain's Jawbone created by the Reddit community can now be found on GitHub at https://github.com/tn3rt/cains-jawbone. Whether or not anyone else manages to solve the mystery of Cain’s Jawbone, Wildgust seems to consider its revival a win not just for word puzzle fans, but also for experimental literature that challenges our ideas about what a novel can be.