I don’t think I’ve ever read a book and been at a total loss as to describe what the story was or who any of the characters were, but that’s entirely the case with Cain’s Jawbone!
To be totally fair, it’s not your standard novel - you could even argue that it’s not really a novel so much as it is a puzzle that just looks like a novel.
Published in 1934 and written by “Torquemada”, the Observer’s cryptic crossword compiler (real name Edward Powys Mathers), Cain’s Jawbone (aka the first murder weapon) is a 100 page murder mystery whodunit where the pages are deliberately printed out of order and the mystery is not just in figuring out the correct page sequence but who the murder victims and killer/s are.
Since its publication nearly 100 years ago, it has been solved by only three people (the rules for submitting your solution are also included in this edition). I didn’t even come close to knowing what was happening, let alone solving the damn thing. I’ve just glanced at the back cover which tells me that there were apparently six murders in the book - news to me!
The pages are nearly all self-contained with a small section at the bottom of each for notes and perforation marks on the side so somebody more determined than I could cut all 100 pages out to help arrange them in the correct order. I might have been able to solve some of this as some pages end on a fragment of a song or poem and there are only 7 or 8 of these, so I might have been able to connect those pages eventually, but I just don’t want to spend hours and hours re-reading it and piecing it all together, especially seeing as how nearly impossible 90% of it seems to be.
A lot of cover blurbs are complete horseshit, usually drawing inaccurate comparisons to bestsellers in order to con some fans of those books to pick up this one - “Normal People meets The Shining!” etc. - but the cover blurb here - “If James Joyce and Agatha Christie had a literary love child, this would be it” from The Daily Telegraph - is 100% accurate. This is exactly how the book reads if you read it in the jumbled sequence it's printed in, because it has that whodunit flavour crossed with Joyce’s stream of conscious nonsensicalness.
I would also say it’s a bit like reading Edward Gorey, minus his wonderful illustrations, as his sentences often have little to do with one another across a book and convey a vague sense of menace too.
I love that something like this exists - it’s a unique and clever approach to the genre - and Tom Gauld’s cover art is charming. But this is definitely a book that made no other impression on me otherwise - zero clue what the story was, who the characters were, or what was going on at any given time. A total mystery that I’ll never forget because there was nothing to remember!
Cain’s Jawbone is an obscure literary curio and perhaps an esoteric novelty gift rather than a must-read.
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