I have been called a Real Life Sherlock by many folks I respect within Law Enforcement. Cain's Jawbone is the puzzle that gets to decide if that's actually earned. In 1942 a crossword got too easy, so the Daily Telegraph built one vicious enough to recruit five strangers into Bletchley Park without their knowledge. Cain's Jawbone runs the same test, except the Laurence Sterne Trust holds a verified solution, so every page I get right or wrong actually means something.

In this episode:

The true story of the 1942 Telegraph crossword that became a Bletchley Park recruitment filter

Why Cain's Jawbone sits in that same category, not in Masquerade's or Cicada 3301's

What happens when the Real Life Sherlock reputation gets thrown at a puzzle that's beaten almost everyone who's tried it

Real material lifted straight into the fiction: Defoe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Conrad, a Jacobite execution, an Egyptian cigarette brand down to the exact sizing

Arthur Conan Doyle turning up four separate times, including a dummy bell rope built exactly like the murder weapon in The Speckled Band
Evidence the narrator changes page to page, and what two possible voices sound like so far

Ten pages down, ninety to go, and why the narrator insisting they're out of their depth might be the actual lie

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

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Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

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