If you are in the UK and have an interest in historical codebreaking, I’d recommend moseying over to PBS America (Freeview channel 84) this coming Wednesday evening (28 April 2021) at 8.40pm for “The Codebreaker“.
First aired in the US in January 2021, this documentary is on Elizebeth Friedman (1892-1980), whom I expect most Cipher Mysteries readers will already be well aware of:
The story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work decoding thousands of messages for the US government would send notorious gangsters to prison and helped bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in the Second World War.
As an aside, a lot of her personal documents were made available a few years ago, leading to a rash of books being written about her life (though not all of which got published). The specific biography that “The Codebreaker” was based on is Jason Fagone’s (2017) “The Woman who Smashed Codes“.
So there ought to be a lot of intriguing raw material there to fashion a good narrative out of, rather than simply focusing on rum runners, the Doll Woman, and Sargo. Looking forward to it! 🙂