by Matt Brennan

My first introduction to Cain’s Jawbone was quite a few years ago, and it was a concept that intrigued me since. Detective fiction, the whodunnit, et cetera, already straddled the line of gamification; the genre has always lent itself well to its mysteries acting as pseudo-puzzle games, and perhaps more modern detective fiction that specifically gives its readers an in to solve the mystery themselves (for instance, think of Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective as a main example of this concept) can trace some lineage back to this immense word puzzle. Cain’s Jawbone can be fairly accurately described as a jigsaw puzzle where every piece has smooth sides—the only way to tell what goes where is to look at the contents of each page and connect them all from what you can gain by reading.

The setup of the “plot,” which the goal of the game is to unravel, is undoubtedly the simplest part of Cain’s Jawbone: people are dead, find out who killed them. Naturally, the simplicity stops there, as the meat of the game involves 100 short pages of extremely dense, opaque prose. There’s a first-person narrator (well, to spoil something minor, there are several first-person narrators, one for each murder in the story in fact), a terrible string of murders, and the rest consists of trying to piece together each unforgiving page in such a way that reveals the chronological order of events and, ultimately, the culprits behind the crime.

The most important thing about Cain’s Jawbone is the pages themselves. That’s fairly obvious considering they’re the only implement with which the game is played, and when completed, the pages form, ostensibly, a book. Edward Mathers, the author and developer of Cain’s Jawbone (under the pseudonym “Torquemada”) was very smart about how these pages were structured: every page has about a paragraph, maybe a little more or less depending on what’s happening on each page, of text, and with very few exceptions, each page is completely self-contained. Every sentence, bit of information, and concept that each page has is all there, and though the reader may need to find other pages for context, there’s no information bleed anywhere. It’s structured incredibly cleanly, and that gives so much more to the game aspect of Cain’s Jawbone, as having each page self-contained with difficult-to-parse text and cleverly packed information makes the task of putting every page in order that much more challenging and that much more engaging at once.

If there is one piece of criticism that I can level at Cain’s Jawbone, it’s that it would be an absolutely unbearable read on its own. The multiple narrators are almost never differentiated in an easy-to-understand way, the writing style is designed specifically to be as hard to comprehend as possible, and the characters the readers follow do and say things that can border on the nonsensical. Simply put, Cain’s Jawbone, in solved chronological order, is not great mystery fiction—I might go so far as to call it bad mystery fiction.

However, with those criticisms, every one of them has something in common, which is that they all add something—a twist, another layer of difficulty, a bit of humor—to the game part of Cain’s Jawbone, which is already excellent and made even better by these additions. The impenetrable writing and clumsy plot development, though both awful for mystery fiction in a vacuum, are here calculated risks to make the game better at the expense of the story. Given that the game is clearly the more important component of Cain’s Jawbone as evidenced by its circulation, it is not unfair to say these risks paid off, even though the reward of being able to read the story end-to-end as it was originally written is heavily diminished in the process. With how famously difficult the puzzle is to solve, completing it may as well be its own reward.

In conclusion, Cain’s Jawbone is the logical conclusion of the early trends towards gamification of mystery fiction. Though the mystery series of the time were exploring the concepts of puzzle fiction and the mystery novel as something to be solved by the reader (most notably the Ellery Queen series, a contemporary of Cain’s Jawbone; furthermore, given that Mathers published Cain’s Jawbone during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, authors such as Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh were exploring the idea of “fair play” in the mystery novel and how to give the readers a fair shot at solving it themselves), Cain’s Jawbone is unique in how directly and entirely it turns mystery fiction into a game for its readers. Mathers attempted a lot of ambitious things with this work, and got quite a lot of it right; the result isn’t perfect, but as far as taking the familiar trappings of a Golden Age mystery and turning it into a full-on puzzle game goes, it’s very close.