Just a quick note to say that Cipher Mysteries has just tipped over the 400,000-visit mark slightly earlier than I expected. So a hearty big Thank You to everyone who has dropped by so far – I hope there’ll be plenty more nice stuff here for you here yet to come, and please feel free to join the other 444 Cipher Mysteries subscribers by putting your email address in at the top right box!
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Seemingly-prehistoric accounting surf dude Pete Bowes has a rigorous work ethic: “No drinks before five and no drugs before midday. This is basic. No shoes, no haircuts. No shaving. No worries.”
He also has (or seems to have) a Big Fat Theory on the Tamam Shud case: that it was Alf Boxall wot dun it (basically). He calls this his “Boxall Code”, and is drip-dripping hints to it on his blog in the tags.
The story he’s posting in a series of vignettes comes across as vivid & homely, brutal and foolish: it’s like a themed short story collection based around a (so far) unlikeable main character. But unless it turns out that Pete has the flickerings of evidence to back it up, though, that’s all it remains. Was the Unknown Man in the RAAF’s 76 Squadron in Salamaua? Possibly. But not “probably” just yet.
In many ways, I’m sympathetic to this enterprise: reconstructing history “at the edge” is a perilous business, and the twin pigeonholes of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ are often a hindrance when your research is dealing with many uncertainties simultaneously. But hopefully Pete will start to be a little less opaque about what he’s trying to do, now that he’s got into the swing of it a bit more. 🙂