A little over a year ago, in November 2021, Sarah Scannell walked into a bookshop and was smitten with an enigmatic book originally published in England in 1934.
Little did she know that this serial killing tale, which remained in the dark for almost 80 years, would become an unlikely bestseller thanks to a video of her on TikTok.
The Jaw of Cain is a creation of the Englishman Edward Powys Mathers better known by the pen name Torquemada and for the crossword he wrote for The Observer newspaper in the 1920s and 1930s.
The book has just arrived in Brazil via Intrínseca. Even without much publicity, it has already sold 140,000 copies in less than a month, and publisher Jorge Oakim estimates it will hit 200,000 by the turn of the year.
A remarkable achievement, all the more so for a work whose price for publication rights, according to the publisher, was a far cry from more controversial titles by internationally known authors.
In the plot, six people are murdered and the reader is asked to find out who committed the crimes. However, the great mystery Torquemada proposes lies not in the plot, but in the peculiarity that the story, told in exactly 100 pages, was published out of order leaving it up to the reader to choose the pages correctly to organize order.
Simple? Well, combining 100 pages gives 32 million possible sequences. Only four people have managed the feat so far and Tiktoker Sarah has not been one of them.
Sarah, who lives in San Francisco, posted a short clip on November 14 last year in which she said she discovered the book and decided to “take the nearly impossible mission as an opportunity to fulfill the dream of her life, Walls.” to turn my room into a frame of “murders” like crime movies.
The video went viral. Thousands of people began doing the same, marking the pages of the book and pinning them to the walls to enlighten the plot.
Virtually forgotten, The Jaw of Cain had returned to print almost by accident in 2019. A British museum curator has solved the mystery the third person to have accomplished the feat and interest from some people has led to it being rereleased by Unbound, a crowdfunded London publisher.
According to the Guardian, only two people had solved the mystery by then, even in the 1930s (they won a £25 prize back then, about $2,000 in today’s value).
To celebrate the relaunch, Unbound offered £1,000 to anyone who could solve the puzzle within a year. Dispute organized and 12 readers invited to the challenge.
The only one who succeeded was the English comedian John Finnemore who said he almost went insane. Taking advantage of the domestic seclusion enforced by the pandemic, he was the fourth reader to solve the mystery.
However, the spike in interest in the book came late last year with Sarah’s post not even being among the most popular tiktokers. Today, despite her fame, she has just over 76,000 followers but her first post about the book has already garnered 6.6 million views.
From then on, dozens of other people appeared, posting videos and photos on social media with the pages of the book nailed to the bedroom walls.
For many, the initial barrier is understanding the meaning of words and phrases that are no longer used. “The hardest thing so far isn’t that the book is written out of order,” says Sarah in one of her videos. “I don’t understand some things because I don’t know the rules for 1934.”
The Brazilian edition, available in paper only, has detachable pages. “The great grace lies on the way to the solution, in exchange with other people,” says the editor of Intrinseca.
Young Brazilians have already multiplied in networks whose bedroom walls are covered with pages of mystery. So far there is no news that anyone came to the correct result.
Giuliano Guandalini