Can You Solve Cain’s Jawbone: The (Nearly) Impossible Literary Puzzle?
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Cain’s Jawbone is a literary puzzle and murder mystery that has been around for 90 years and, after all these years, only three people have ever solved it. It was devised in 1934 by English poet and cryptic crossword compiler Edward Powys Mathers, who wrote under the name Torquemada, and consists of 100 pages from his 1934 collection The Torquemada Puzzle Book. Powys Mathers claimed the pages were printed “in an entirely haphazard and incorrect order” and wrote that it was too late for him to remedy the ordering of the pages.