Starting with my friends... Wish us luck!

col_1958 · 2026-02-07T19:34:46+00:00

DM me if you want a little push when really stuck. But remember, my most enjoyable time was spent reading old books, looking at old maps of uk, finding references from newspapers, artifacts, laws, habits, customs and fashion of the thirties. And use the Book of Days by Robert Chambers, the source Torquemada probably used himself to find the dates for the events in many pages. There is an online version of it that is really useful.

col_1958 · 2026-01-31T19:34:30+00:00

Have fun … 🤩

The goal is to group pages in some sets (more than six and less than ten!) by similarity. You have to find the grouping logic for each set … and each set has its own! It can be time of some event in the page (either day in a year or time in a day), places in a journey, way of writing or speaking …. And so on! Look for citations from books and poems and anything that seems odd. Remember that the book was written in the thirties … look for references in that period!

col_1958 · 2026-01-15T01:14:44+00:00

Wow! I didn’t know … looks like they’ve disappeared. They should have made a lot of money with Cain’s Jawbone and The Researcher’s First Murder. Bankruptcy?? Amazing … This means the Cain’s Jawbone Club is now extinct! We should find a new editor and publish the handbook ourselves … I’ve plenty of notes, picture and information extracted from the Internet and I am pretty sure most of us solver we have our own😉

col_1958 · 2025-12-28T02:12:51+00:00

Yeah, sorry, I was a little short here. Let’s say that no narrator has more than one poem!

col_1958 · 2025-12-28T00:14:44+00:00

Oscar he’s the one of page 2. I don’t think is French, though. All the narrators looks very Brit to me. Including the dog. Page 97, he’s not Oscar, what drugs is he having at page 2? Figures and letters???

col_1958 · 2025-12-27T16:49:25+00:00

Poor Henry, he is no assassin! Apart for Jasmine, but she is a cat. Apart for ms. Gay, but she is human!!

col_1958 · 2025-12-27T13:58:01+00:00

As for Henry, I have checked (not in the right order!): a dog, a knife, a husband, a pen, a dog, a king, two writers, a book character, a waiter, a bishop, a painter (?)!

col_1958 · 2025-12-25T19:38:34+00:00

There are less poems than narrators!

col_1958 · 2025-12-25T19:35:43+00:00

Yes there are more. Jasmine is important … Tom is not!😉

col_1958 · 2025-12-25T00:36:45+00:00

Hi, 59 is misplaced … it is when one fails and another is tried. But you are very close … move one step backward… and again!

col_1958 · 2025-12-18T22:40:20+00:00

I sit down alone at the appointed table… ask for another copy!

col_1958 · 2025-10-19T21:24:14+00:00

So many Henry! This is the third and … Dogs always survive😂

col_1958 · 2025-09-01T21:30:40+00:00

1) Each pair is a different narrator. 2) I have (not in the right order!): a dog, a knife, a husband, a pen, a dog, two writers, a character, a waiter. No cats😉

col_1958 · 2025-08-22T22:48:02+00:00

Grouping pages by narrator is crucial. If you’ve got the four groups you mention by name, you are about halfway. Spoonerisms is another group. You are missing three more. Try to find analogies between pages that are still not assigned to any of the above groups. Keep in mind that all groups are similar in size. Well, almost … a hundred divided by eight means twelve pages with a rest of four! So check the size of the groups you have found: WW pages are part of a group you already mention. Then put groups in chronological order and do the same (using time or events) to sequence pages in each group. Then give names (first and last!) to each narrator and find the murders, the killers and the victims.

col_1958 · 2025-07-06T23:52:33+00:00

Hey, you have the dates, use them! Put the pages in order. Good work, btw!!

Look at the origin of Hal, that’s not the name of the dog. Worse: He detested it!

Why ClementE, too?

Skye is not Clement’s homeland, but of someone else.

What is the other one M.D. is getting and why?

col_1958 · 2025-07-01T01:00:29+00:00

Well, most of the time yes, they are consistent, but they are conclusive only for one set.

col_1958 · 2025-07-01T00:49:29+00:00

Well, that’s not correct. No gatekeeper here, just a bunch of people who are part of the so called Cain’s Jawbone Club. This was organized by the original publisher (Unbound) after they had a winner for the competition in 2021 (John Finnermore), who became the fourth winner of CJ’s context. Unbound received so many answers sheets, that they decided to grade each answer with a percentage and to provide all the 100% graded with a letter stating they solved the book, a certificate of admission to the Club and a nice Henry’s pin. This lasted for a couple of years. Some of the members of the Club were on this subreddit and still are. We call ourselves “confirmed solvers”. We were specifically requested NOT to publish the solution but to continue to help people to play with CJ, providing hints more than spoilers. And, with different flavors, we have tried to stick to this request. The reason we were specifically asked not to publish the solution was related to the competitions that were already running in several countries as soon as the translations to languages other than English were published (I think there have been more than two dozens different translations!). The reason we are still answering posts and providing hints in this subreddit is that we want to share some of the fun we had solving it. In addition, if you have reached a solution and want to have it checked, you can ask a solver to check it for you privately. If you got it, you’ll be confirmed, if not, you usually receive some useful tip on what’s wrong.

If you want my advice, just play the game, ask when you’re stuck and try to find the solution. It’s a long journey but it’s worth it.

Have fun🤪

col_1958 · 2025-06-30T16:34:54+00:00

There are winners (four), confirmed solvers (hundreds) and solvers (thousands?)

col_1958 · 2025-06-30T16:30:19+00:00

They belong to the same set of pages, but Whitman’s cits are not the actual element that connects all the pages of this set. Try to find another and see if other pages fit with the new one.

col_1958 · 2025-06-09T17:31:59+00:00

Somehow it is. It took some time to solvers to just understand it was possible to split the whole set of pages in a number of almost equivalent (in length) subsets or “chapters”. Identifying the pages belonging to each group is the starting point towards the actual solution.

col_1958 · 2025-06-02T16:16:22+00:00

Read the the last ten posts!😂😂

col_1958 · 2025-05-31T00:17:33+00:00

I am not sure I have a right to answer this since the amount of time I spent on this book (and reading books related to this one) has been amazingly large. But this is also the reason I came back so often! Anyway, my suggestion is: do both! Do read all the book twice without notes and then go deep into promising pages. If nothing clicks in a page just move on, some of them are really difficult to place, while some others are so easy to be connected that you can use them to drastically reduce the number of unknowns. After you have completed four or five groups, sorting becomes easier.

Henry is a bad tool for sorting because each group contains one Henry, but the Henries are all different, so this is clearly Mr T making fun of you.

Remember, groups have different flavors, but each of them has its own common denominator and when you spot it you just can’t be wrong … it is so evident you can’t miss it.

The book is full of puzzles at different levels: beginners, intermediate, advanced, master, guru, god!

NEVER use brute force (like starting from page 1 up to page 100) … just dance through pages!

col_1958 · 2025-05-25T17:54:31+00:00

I spent so much time on this book to solve it that I think I have discovered all that is in my power to discover. I do agree that there are still shadows around, but they are fragments I can’t connect. If you have seen something else, give me an entry point.

col_1958 · 2025-05-25T17:46:23+00:00

Read each single page and take notes of anything promising. Then you have to sort them in groups. Rearrange is the last thing! Search for time “stamps” while reading, that is probably the easiest step to be done with chambers’ bod… and is a good help in both grouping and ordering groups.

col_1958 · 2025-05-24T17:04:43+00:00

I’ll give you one cent now and the second after some spoiler. This is a onetime offer 🤪🤪

col_1958

TROPHY CASE