The Real Life Sherlock | Cain's Jawbone Ep 4 | Trust No One

0:00The deduction is... Page 3 of the jawbone. We're going to go back to it just for a moment because I got something wrong the first time. Yeah, I'd assume it. It happens. And I didn't clock it until a few pages later. I want to say page 3. I don't know if it's actually page 3, but you know on me. By the time I noticed it, I'd already read past it twice. That's becoming the thing about these pages. You don't necessarily catch the trick on the first pass. You catch the residue of it two or three pages later when this same or similar shape turns up and your brain finally flags it as a pattern instead of a coincidence. Dorky Mala quotes Walt Whitman, almost word for word, then and exactly where the poem's next line should sit. It takes it out. It doesn't just skip it, it doesn't tell you it's gone, it's rights and you know,

1:03I'm reading it. Let me get you the actual page again. And there was a forgotten line. I found that as a nice bit of self-aware writing, kind of like a cheeky wink to the reader, move on. It's not a wink. It's a term, a real one. Textual scholars use it every day on manuscripts that are like centuries old, and it doesn't mean forgotten. Means damaged. There's a word for a hole in the text, Dorky Mala didn't lose a line by accident. At least I don't think so. It doesn't seem like the type. You faked the damage on purpose and then told you exactly where to find it, which is

2:05the kind of detail that either means nothing or means everything. There's only one way to find it. You check whether it happens again. So today, my intention is to show you what the word actually is, where it comes from. And two of the other tricks I'm screwing around with that are kind of right next to it on the same handful of pages. Turns out there isn't one trick hiding in these pages. There's a lot. But once you know what they look like, you can't stop seeing them. But again, that triggers you like a PTSD. So in that you can't stop seeing them. Is he doing it then just to screw with you, just to be that guy? And if it were me, I would do that. Because would you see what I'm going to do three? Would you see what three of them actually are? You stop reading Keynes Jorbound as a puzzle with clever writing in it. You start seeing it as a kind of a toolkit

3:10of sorts. Everyone thinks they know what this is because they made one of them in primary school with their name down the side of the page. I made some unpleasant and insulting ones at some of my old jobs. The real history though is older and considerably less innocent than that. The earliest confirmed examples sit inside the Hebrew Bible. Several passages in Psalms are built. So the first letter of each line runs through the alphabet in order. You go back further into ancient Greece and you get there a rethrayan symbol. I think it's pronounced. I don't know if it is. I've only ever read about the term. I've never heard it sent out there. But it was an article who wrote her prophecies on separate leaves and then arranged them. So the first

4:10letters spelt out a word once you laid them in sequence. Which is if you think about it, kind of the same stick that a kidnap a uses in a ransom note that's built from different magazine cuttings. It's different centuries same idea. You hide the message in the structure, not in the sentence. But what's notable about the Symbols version specifically is that it isn't even really a poem in the way we think of one. It's a set of separate physical leagues arranged in an order where the order itself carries the information. You take one leaf out of that sequence and the message is gone. That's that's the Acrostic Principle taken to its most literal form, a meaning that lives entirely in arrangement, not in content. Medieval monks use the form to honor saints and pincrons. And centuries later Edgar Allen used it to hide a woman's name inside a

5:13love pine, a version that's considerably more devious than the one we school kind instead of the so the first letter of every line. He took the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third, so on and so forth all the way down the page on a diagonal. Nobody at the dinner party where he first read it allowed had any idea whose name was sitting inside it and so until someone worked out the pattern. Lewis Carroll did something very similar at the end of through the looking glass, closing the book with a poem whose first letters spell out the full name of the real girl who inspired Alice. Now that's that's not a one-off for Lewis either. Years earlier, um, in 1861, something like that, he took to completely different across the into a Christmas gift for three real sisters. The name is running down the first letters of every line hidden inside the children's book. He gave them as a present. The man built puzzles into

6:18his gifts as a matter of habit. It's the it's the same principle every time. The message isn't in what the words say. It's in where they sit. So what makes it strange that a cross-dicks are fallen so far is if I mean if you ask someone today what an acrostic is you'll get the, you know, is that the thing we did in primary school with her own name down the side of the page? A device, the Hebrew Bible used for scripture and Poe used to smuggle a name in past a room full of denigasts. Mim-demoted to a worksheet. Torque Mada was writing in 1934, close enough to when the form still carried the same weight to use it and then expect the sharp reader to notice. The second technique, this one's almost the direct ancestor of what's happening with the Whitman and the pho material across pages two and three. A sento, C-E-N-T-O,

7:21is poem or a piece of prose that's built almost entirely out of other people's lines. Not paraphrased. It's not inspired by it's lifted whole and then stitched together into something new. The word comes from the Latin for patch work. Same route you use for a patch garment because that's literally the technique you cut pieces out of existing fabric and you sew them into a different shape. The oldest one that we can actually name is a retelling of Medea built entirely from lines of virtual, credited to, I think it was a writer, but it was credited to a Ocidius Gator sometime in the third or fourth century, something like that. Not long after, a Byzantine Empress named Udocia wrote sentos built from Homer as a form of tribute. The technique went quite for a long stretch and then came roaring back with the modernists. There was

8:22as repounds cantos, T.S. Eliot's, the wasteland. They both lean on exactly this kind of instinct. He's just all the voices stitched rather than invented. The form never really went away with that either. Modern poets, they still build them on purpose. Sometimes as a party trick, sometimes as something closer to a silence, just pulling a line from writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing and then setting them to each other inside the same poet. One poet built a sento entirely out of other people's lines and gave it a title borrowed from Edward Lear on top of the borrowed underneath it. There's a line between a sento and a plagiarism though and it's not really a literary line. It's closer to a legal and ethical one. A sento announces itself. Its collage recognizable as

9:26collage built to be admired for the stitching. Same technique done without acknowledgement, passed off as a original composition has a much less flattering name. Look at the AI stuff of late, but Torki Maier sits on the honest end of that line. He isn't hiding that he's borrowed. He's kind of daring you to notice whose voice is it that you're reading. Spotting one isn't necessarily just neuratically obsessing about every line. Scholars comparing a suspected sento against source material. Look for exact phrase much. It's that there are two precise to be a coincidental echo. Several words in the same order. Doing the same grammatical job they did in the original. That's the same standard I'm trying to use on these pages as we go through. It's not a vague echo of Whitman style. It's the actual words in the actual order. Doing the actual job that they did in

10:30where I found them. If that gets frustrating then I'm not picking up. I don't even want to chance the possibility that I'm right and inadvertently give someone else an answer. But that's what's sitting inside King's Jorban. There's an infamous plague scene on page 2 near enough word for word. There's a few separate Whitman pieces from different areas. Torquimada isn't quoting for flavor I don't think. He's building sentos and hiding the scenes. And there's one that kind of gets us back to where we started. In manuscript studies, a lacuna is a gap. The whole my text used to be. It goes by damage, decay, a page torn out, ink that's faded past reading. Some scholars would market formally usually with a kind of bracketed

11:31ellipsis. And then argue for decades about what probably used to be in that. Very well, Scott a famous one. A few missing words in the middle of a sentence about an unnamed queen. And then editors have been proposing rival guesses for what filled that gap since like the 19th century. Nobody's ever going to know for certain. That's what a real lacuna does. It's not a plot device. It's just loss. The Baywolf gap specifically is added to editors arguing over it for the better part of the century. Kemp Malone proposed filling it with the name I don't even know how you pronounce it. Why are SE? People who study old English for a living are still arguing about whether he was right. Really a hundred years of academic disagreement over a handful of missing words and no verdict anywhere. Genuine damage doesn't usually arrive at a convenient moment either. We'll manuscripts lose pages to a fire to damp to mice,

12:36not to the exact spot where the missing content would have been most dramatically useful. A gap that happens to fall precisely where the story needs one is at minimum, worth a second look. I don't think that's me being paranoid it might be, but you know I have to challenge that with one of the most difficult literary puzzles ever made. But that's an instinct to manuscript scholar to have. And the manuscript scholar, I beg fat am not. Faking damage to a text isn't some cute idea that's been invented for a YouTube video either. It's a real category of literary deceit. Serious enough that historians have written entire books on it. Manufacturing the appearance of loss are of an authentic gap to make the text look older, more damaged, more legitimate than it actually is. That's a recognized move in academic literature on forgery. I think talking about is doing a small contained deliberate kind of cheeky

13:37version of exactly that inside a piece of commercial fiction from 1934, which is what makes page 3 so deliberate. Like talking about isn't missing aligned by accident the way it damaged maybe evil manuscript is missing on this is writing fiction. Every word on that page exists because he chose to put it there. Including the words that tell you a different word used to be there, it isn't anymore. He's forging the exact symptom of a scholar would use to identify genuine textual damage and he's been doing it inside a brand new book that was never even damaged at all. Right? So put the first techniques next to each other and page 3 stops looking like some kind of flourish and starts looking like a sequence. He's lifted Whitman, almost word for word. That's that's a sentiment. Stitching someone else's voice into their into your own sentence, then immediately in the very next greet he tells you a line is missing. That's the lconum of manufacturing the exact

14:42symptom of genuine manuscript damage. I don't think he's doing one trick on that page. I think he's doing two back to back in the same breath. Some of the other pages does like four or five, but that that's what changes once you know the vocab. Before that page reads as one clever moment, it now reads as a sequence. Borrow then fake the gap and a sequence is something that you can go looking for again. Right? Here's why I haven't found yet. At least not confirmed anyway. An acrostic not on page 3, not anywhere through page 10, well to 20 now, which I didn't reach for that tool this early, or it means I haven't spotted it. And then given given everything else on this list, I'd put more money on the second one to be fair. One occurrence of a technique isn't a

15:44pattern. Two occurrences of two different techniques on the same page is close enough to a pattern that it changes how page 11, page 21, page 31, they all get ready. If an acrostic does turn up some way in the next pages that I get into, that's not just a nice find. It's the third leg of a stool that's currently only standing on two. And once all three are there, I'm not treating any future strange sentences as a fluke. I'm not going to treat it as an instruction. But that's only three. I found at least 11 that I'm quietly confident of. Obviously until I get through all 100, I'm not going to be quietly confident about anything. I don't think. But these are the ones that I've found. But at least with things like those three, you hide the message in the structure. You steal

16:44other people's voices and then stitch them into your own. You fake the wound and hand the reader the diagnosis. And we found two of them sitting inside the first handful of pages of a hundred-page puzzle from a man who named himself after the Spanish Inquisitions chief interrogator. No coincidence. I don't think. Well, rather at least it's no coincidence I'm comfortable with. Three examples of each from three different centuries. That's not a coincidence either. Coincidences one strange sentence. This is a pattern with a literal paper trail. And it means every strange sentence from here to page 100 gets checked against all three and a bunch of others before it goes into the world empire. Enough about the toolkit. Two or three confirmed ones still missing. I've done a lot of coffee so far. So far. A lot of coffee.

17:47Let's collect this together. We've got 10 more pages. Right, 11 through 20. I love it fall back that the way pages three through 10 did. Some of it didn't. Or some of it has secrets yet to be told. Oh, Kiroki. So this is the kind of the assembly point. This is not going to be lit. This is in the studio for lighting the things. So it's just going to be one of those elements where you are almost peeking behind the curtain. Almost peeking behind the curtain of the entire endeavour. That's charging, which is fine. So this is what it is. This is the

18:49while this has been the entirety of the process. Boss far. You're a little bit more light about Hey, now you just have to be honest. It's not the prettiest but not need to be pretty. I'm here to solve. So then what you get from each of these things is I'll be called quite fond of having the work around me. So there goes, but I need to feel that. But I think it can be up there. Yeah, look at me, that could. But you. That's not exactly this steadiest.

19:51All right, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. All right. Then we do this here. Navel it. The whole kit and caboodle in the order. The gear is this would irritate anyone who is even remotely considering being any kind of a neat freak. The point is that this is entirely ordered or niche and not for you. So

20:59you don't have to say you love me just because you can. One of the word board comes with big stalls. Right? So you know, this is page 12. So about 85 flashcards so far. And each flashcard is average unit. That's between 9 and 12 depending upon how you split them. Observations and each one of them has its own

22:04connect your rabbit hole. But you have to. I imagine that you would have to track and everything to be even remotely considered. There you go. Telekinesis. Obviously that's not real. But professionally, he's anywhere. And his scene fits and upgrades maybe with his presence. So

23:10I'm definitely going to need a big boat. How many of you find? And these are the tall start. You should be okay. Dear listener, this is editing Ben at the moment. As the intention for this particular part was to show you the vlog aspect capacity of trying to solve a puzzle like this. I have almost inadvertently noticed that the insanity is very much starting to kick in. I'm unsure of whether I'm talking to myself, talking to you guys, or talking through observations and thought patterns and whatnot from that particular moment. Counting cards, counting observations, there was numbers, elements that just occurred to me of which page could possibly go next to which. So it is with that in mind that I will put

24:20together for you a little rundown of how it normally goes. So far, 20 pages. And this is the most I've ever done. A bit terrible ninja. They get a different vantage point. Wait, page 20 there's a bunch of, but you're whiten towards the bottom more old English. And I don't know, some of the things that require thinking about for it. I mean, I don't even know how to start with, I mean. Probably now way. Technical snacks, tiny blower. And I do have 16 or 16 dips.

25:35I don't know if you've ever solved any puzzles before, but me, I need to take breaks. So, here's, I know people hate it when I talk about what I'm not going to do and what I'm not, you know, what this isn't first. One of my book reviews that I got was I'm too digressive on me and I'm wondering and stop telling people about what it isn't and start telling people about what it is. What it isn't is on a spectrum with what it is. So if you learn what it isn't, you understand what it is. Right. So, let me tell you what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to tell you when I think this person did it on things like it. Not because I'm being clay. I mean, mostly it's because I genuinely don't know you. And because even if I'm right, if,

26:38even a little bit right, the absolute worst thing I could do is hand you the answer before you've even had a chance to earn it yourself. So these kinds of discussions will never be a reveal. Ever. They are, they are kind of a status update from somewhere in the middle of the woods, sent back to base camp. So you know, I'm still alive right here and I think I might be closer to the summit than I was when we last spoke. That kind of thing, right. So this is more of a catch-up, not a recap. If you've been with this in episode one, you know the shape of what I'm doing. Working through this page by page by page by page by page out loud on record. We might best do not skimp us the single strange word because I mean, as a fan out so far, strange words are usually where some kind of data is hiding, lurking and amidst some kind of definition I haven't heard of before. But what's changed since last time isn't the method?

27:42It's, it's mostly how much of the method is starting to pay off. So, here's why I can tell you without telling you the thing. The book is not just pretty for pretty sick. Every, every, every word that I've worked so far has turned out to be built from real material. I almost said every page, but it's really every word. Real quotations from real writers, some of them enormously famous, some of them so obscure that finding them felt a bit like cheating. Real historical events, real place names, at times that you can check down to the actual buildings that are still standing today. Real professions, try that again with, with my teeth, real professions, real legal language, real financial terminology from the exact year the book was written. Nothing is there because

28:45it just sounds cute or evocative. Everything I've checked and I mean absolutely everything turns out to be doing a specific job. That's why these episodes take forever. That's the first thing that changed them since I started. So, I no longer read a strange word on the page and just assume its flavor or some kind of exposition. I assume it's a fingerprint and so far that's being right way more than it's been wrong. The second thing, certain names keep coming back. Not in every page, not in a pattern that I could even derive some kind of a formula for. It doesn't mean there is one, it just means I can't derive a formula for it. But often enough and specifically enough that you can really stop believing in coincidence as an explanation and then start treating the recurrence itself as some kind of evidence. So, when the same name shows up on a page set in one kind of scene and then shows up again dozens of pages later and it completely different scene

29:47with a completely different mood, you don't shrug that off. You ask what it means that the same person keeps turning up in different rooms of this book and then some of what I'm finding when I ask that question is quite unsettling to be fair. Not in a spooky way but just in a subtle way. The way it feels when you notice someone in a group of photos standing slightly closer to the frame than they should be. Right? No names, no pages. But I mean I will tell you this book rewards suspicion. It wants you to trust nobody, including the narrator, including your own first read of any given sentence. The next thing and I mean and this may be sit up in my chair a little bit. There's a lot where a line fairly deep into the pages of works where the narrator says almost

30:53impassing that they've never met a truly wicked person before but they're frightened because they suspect wickedness won't look like anything. We won't announce itself. We will look exactly like everybody else in the room. And currently I think that might be the whole book. Whole book just talking to the reader for a second. Not the characters private fear, like a cheeky warning about the method. You don't go looking for the person who looks wrong. You go looking for the person who fits in perfectly but because of how varied it is you can't not look at the person that is wrong. Right? That's the kind of camouflage your book built entirely out of misdirection we use. And I don't know if that's the intended reading. I could really be putting my own obsession with behavioral observation onto some throwaway line written

31:5590 years ago by a man who is tragically not available for a comment but it stuck with me. And it's changed how I read every page since. Right? A few months ago before I thought this idea to take this on properly, John Finnemore was the guy that solved this during lockdown. Fourth person ever. I went looking for anything it said publicly about how he corrected. And the only detail he kind of gave. And I don't even think it was a purposeful detail but it was a detail all the same. There's something about legal precedent from the 30s mattering to solving. I couldn't verify the specifics. It's important to be upfront about that. Right? But there is a part of it that kind of got under my skin.

32:59Before I ever heard his name, I had already independently. On my own started noticing real legal language buried in the book. Actual legal terms, actual doctrine. Showing up in places you really wouldn't expect it. Right? I hadn't gone looking for that thread. I hadn't gone looking for it because someone told me to look for it. I found it because I was paying attention. The way I always tell people to pay attention. And months later it turns out someone who actually finished the puzzle may have been circling the exact same idea. That's not proof I'm right. That's not proof of anything. But it's the first moment in this whole process where I genuinely thought, you know, out loud, alone in a room surrounded by my washboard musical instrument, not abs, obviously. Look at me. Hang on. You know, I might actually be on to something. Be on to something real.

34:03So, so where does that leave me? Honestly, uncertain, genuinely uncertain, but in a good way. I'm not lost. I don't think. I'm not stuck, but I'm standing in that specific uncomfortable, thrilling place where you've gathered enough evidence to feel the shape of something, but not enough to prove it. Every working you're masturbating knows this feeling. It's the moment before you're sure when you're when you're most tempted to convince yourself early and most in danger of building a beautiful theory on top of one coincidence that you've taught yourself into believing. I'm trying really hard not to do that. Every single fine gets checked. Every pattern gets tested against the possibility that it's nothing. I would rather be slow and right and fast and embarrassed in front of 90 years of very patient, very clever people that came before me. So, what I want to kind of promise you, my solemn vow is this. When I actually finish,

35:09when the pages are in order and the six murders are sitting there, solved in front of me, you will not hear the answer from me ever. Not the names, not the pages, not any kind of hints, as a subtle joke, so it technically doesn't count. And I'm not trying to be precious or a dick about things, but that's the whole point of the book. Every person who ever picks this thing up deserves the exact same respect in the blank page that I got. The same nothing to work with except the own attention page by page with no shortcuts. Nobody standing behind them whispering the ending. The moment somebody who's finished starts then handing out the solutions, they haven't just spoiled it for the next person. They've killed the one thing that made this book 90 years of people still trying to solve it. There's a worthiness there. So, I'm never going to be the reason

36:13someone's copy of Keynes' jawbone stops being a mystery and becomes a piece of homework, who the answer's in the back. So, there will never be a reveal episode. I want to finish not ever. What you'll get when I get there is confirmation that I got there and maybe a word on what it felt like to stand at the end of it. That's all. That's the deal. That's how you want to a puzzle like this one. Until then, what you get is a dispatch from the middle, a B.D. Getting a weirdy person in a room with a hundred scrambled pages and a herculean amount of stubbornness in my refusal to stop looking closely at things that other people would likely skimp us. If that sounds like a slow way to spend an evening, you're right. It is. But it's also genuinely one of the best things I've ever done with my attention so far. One more thing before I go. Next time, I want to step back from these specific pages for a bit and

37:19open up the toolkit itself. The actual techniques and book like this and others like it, that they reach for when it wants to hide something in plain sight. Real devices, real names, real history behind them. Not some vague talk about clever writing. Once you know what they look like, you cannot stop seeing them. I suspect a few of you are going to want to go back and we will listen to today's episode. I'm still thinking about the book. Once you do. That's where I'm at. That's where I'm at. So if that's of interest to the journey or of intrigue to yourself and by all means subscribe to the podcast. Pick up a copy of James Corbonne. Oh God. Pick up a copy of Cain's jawbone and follow along and let's do this. But don't show your answers. I see you soon.