Everyone should have an impossible life’s challenge

He may never solve a 100-year-old murder mystery, but damned if he won’t die trying, writes Darrel Bristow-Bovey

This week two people met in an upstairs lounge at the Athletic Club and Social on Buitengracht Street in Cape Town to take the first steps in solving a murder. Six murders, actually, and the case is so cold that it has defeated the most finely grinding ratiocinating minds of the past century, nearly a hundred years’ worth of Holmeses and Marples and Renkos and Maigrets and Jessica Fletchers.

As we read through the opening pages of the case materials I looked up in alarm at Henrietta and she looked at me, and we both felt the weight of the task and the tangled length and unmacadammed width of the road ahead. This isn’t going to be easy.

Henrietta is my oldest friend, or at least the oldest of the friends I regularly see. We’ve known each other since I was 17 and she was 16, and whenever we’re in the same city we meet for lunch and flagons of wine and talk about work and life and mutual friends and enemies, especially enemies. We’ve never before set out to solve a series of murders, but here we are.

Henrietta has bought two copies of Cain’s Jawbone, one for her and one for me, the pages printed on soft creamy cards, unbound in matching boxes whose lids come off like old-fashioned chocolate boxes, the kind that might have contained cherry bonbons injected with cyanide. There are 100 pages, printed out of order, and they were written in 1934 by Edward Powys Mathers, under his pseudonym, Torquemada.

Torquemada invented the cryptic crossword in 1925, the first person to devise a crossword entirely composed of clues that make no goddamned sense to anyone who doesn’t speak a hidden coded language. That wasn’t tricky enough for him, so he also created a grid that didn’t have any black spaces, and also composed his clues in rhyming couplets. What a weirdo.

He also translated Asiatic and Kashmiri poetry into English. From time to time he would compose a poem of his own in the Kashmiri style and slip it into the translations, and no one noticed for decades. Today I suppose he’d be called a fraud and a cultural appropriator, but he was also a genius.

Cain’s Jawbone is a murder-mystery novella, written in prose and paragraphs but also entirely in the medium of cryptic crossword clues. The pages are all mixed up and out of order, and each page ends with a complete sentence so that there are no run-ons. There are some 32 million possible sequences for 100 pages, but only one is correct. In order to figure out who was murdered, and then to try find who did the murdering, you must determine the correct sequence of pages, then solve 100 pages worth of cryptic clues. This would be difficult for a wooly-minded ignoramus like me, who can barely get a toe-hold on one of our dumbeddown and degraded modern cryptic crosswords, but Torquemada’s clues were devised in 1934, when the expectation of a classical education and thorough grounding in languages and world cultures was somewhat more insistent than it is today.

(“Cain’s jawbone”, by the way, is a quote from the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, referring to what is supposed in medieval iconography to be the first murder weapon, when Cain slew Abel with the jawbone of an ass, although the weapon itself is never mentioned in the Bible. In some branchings of the Midrash, that creative and enjoyable collection of rabbinic musings and marginalia, it’s pointed out that not merely was Cain the first murderer, but Abel was actually the first human being ever to die, so Cain probably had to try many techniques to find one that worked. Cain’s jawbone isn’t just a murder weapon, but also a sort of tribute to human perseverance and ingenuity. Is any of this relevant to solving this damned book? Who knows?)

Cain’s Jawbone was offered in 1934 as a public competition, with a cash prize for the first person to place all pages in order, naming the six victims and murderers and providing an account of the methods and motives of the crimes. In the 85 years since, it has only been solved twice (one of the solvers was a certain Mr S SydneyTurner, which seems like a cryptic clue in itself.)

I’ll tell you this: I will never solve the mystery of Cain’s

Jawbone, but by god, I’m going to try, and keep trying for the rest of my life. I’ll try because it’s fun, and because everyone should have an impossible life’s challenge, something bigger than them, that scares and delights and ultimately doesn’t matter. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” said Browning, “or what’s a heaven for?”

But mostly I’ll do it because I have a bet with Henrietta on who does it first, and what more perfect expression of lifelong friendship is there than to be locked in loving competition, in far-flung and separate rooms, working separately towards a common goal? Plus, if she gets it before I do I’ll never hear the end of it.