Cain's Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers (under the pseudonym Torquemada) was published in 1934. This book consists of 100 pages detailing the stories of six different murders. It is the job of the reader to cut or tear out all 100 pages and put them back in the correct order and solve each of the murders. “The number of possible combinations of pages is a figure that is 158 numbers long," says Andrew Anthony of The Guardian.  “The prose is an enigmatic combination of literary allusions, word plays, spoonerisms, and buried clues. It’s a little as if Agatha Christie had been rewritten by T. S. Eliot and then all the pages thrown off a tower block and randomly collected below.” (Anthony, 2021)

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Currently, there are only four people in the world who have solved the mystery of Cain's Jawbone. The book essentially fell off of the world's radar, other than a few reddit pages dedicated to solving it, until a TikTok creator named Sarah Scannell began posting short videos of her journey unraveling Cain's Jawbone. Scrannell took every page ripped from the book's binding and taped them to her wall. Her videos, which have been viewed more than four million times, have caused the book to fly off the shelves. (Flood, 2021) In late 2021, it was completely sold out in stores and online. 

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Readers of Cain's Jawbone have stated that solving it would be next to impossible without the help of Google or other search engines, due to the plethora of literary references from 1930's England. 

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Currently, the publisher Unbound is running a contest that ends on December 31st, 2022. Whoever solves Cain's Jawbone before that date will receive a prize of $300. 

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(Image credits for this section go to The Awesomer [upper left] and SFGATE [lower right].)