The opening line of any narrative is a contract with the reader: it establishes voice, dictates tempo, and subtly outlines the boundaries of the world we are about to enter. But few openings in literary history demand as much of their readers, or offer quite so literal a contract, as the first lines of a bizarre, crossword-infused murder mystery published in 1934:
I sit down alone at the appointed table and take up my pen to give all whom it may concern an exact account of what may happen. Call me nervous, call me fey, if you will; at least this little pen, this mottled black and silver Aquarius, with its nib specially tempered to my order in Amsterdam, is greedy. It has not had much work since it flew so nimbly for the dead old man.
To the casual observer, this is a masterclass in atmospheric, mildly paranoid prose. It evokes the classic, melancholic air of an Edwardian thriller. We can picture the author, bathed in the amber glow of a desk lamp, gripped by premonition (‘call me fey’), clutching a customised fountain pen that seems to possess a sinister will of its own.
But are they really the opening lines of the story?
This is no ordinary story. This is Cain’s Jawbone, a 100-page literary labyrinth conceived by Edward Powys Mathers, who wrote under the apt pseudonym Torquemada, an allusion to the grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. Mathers released this book as a challenge: the pages of the mystery were printed in a completely random order. The reader’s job was to detangle the mess, sort the pages into their correct chronological sequence, and identify six murder victims and their respective killers.
There are millions of possible combinations, but only one correct path. In Cain’s Jawbone, no word is innocent, and every phrase is a potential trap door. Mathers was a pioneer of the cryptic crossword, and he approached narrative design not as a storyteller, but as a cryptographer. To read the text sequentially as printed is an exercise in beautiful nonsense; paragraphs shift mid-sentence, narrators dissolve into one another, and poetry fragments collide with mundane observations. It clearly reminds us of a time when literature wasn’t just consumed, but wrestled with; a reminder that sometimes, the most rewarding stories are the ones we have to put back together with our own hands.
Honestly, solving the mysteries within while keeping the book’s spine intact requires a bit of madness. One practically needs to look at the pages the way a detective looks at a crime scene. That is why I bought two copies: one remains intact for my collection, while the other was broken down into a hundred disbound pages. They are now pinned to my wall, transformed into a sprawling, hyper-obsessive, true-crime-style investigation board.
Standing before this wall, I have found that I am not just looking for plot points, but for linguistic seams. Often, a sentence cuts off mid-phrase on one page and perfectly ends at the top of its true chronological successor. Furthermore, there are six narrators in the book, each with a distinct personality and vocabulary. Grouping pages by ‘voice’ becomes the first major win on the board. And, maybe most intriguingly, if a page drops a random line of verse, it’s never just decoration; it always connects directly to another page featuring the rest of the stanza or a reference to the same poet.
In the end, Cain’s Jawbone is less a novel than an elaborate act of literary mischief. It transforms reading from passive consumption into forensic reconstruction, demanding not just attention, but obsession. Every page becomes a clue, every misplaced fragment a deliberate provocation. Looking at my wall of scattered pages, threads, annotations, and dead ends, I realise that Torquemada’s greatest trick was never simply hiding the solution. It was convincing the reader that madness and method might, in the right proportions, become the same thing.
