Tunbridge Wells, and a pigeony bombshell…?

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Yet more dead WW2 cipher pigeon thoughts for you all (though I rather hope normal service will be resumed shortly, *sigh*).

Peter Hibbs runs a website called Pillblogs (to which commenter Germo passed me a link, thanks very much!), part of “The Defence of East Sussex Project”, a research project. But rather than throwing yet more unsubstantiated pigeon-related speculation onto the media bonfire of the last few days, Pete had some interesting opinions based on actual documents he had recently gone through to do with the military’s Eastern Command Pigeon Service set up in 1940.

Plotting the location of pigeon lofts as found in a 1940 war diary (and with the TW and DK pigeon tags fresh in his memory), Pete noticed that there were quite a few pigeon lofts in Tunbridge Wells, a mere ten or so miles south-east of Bletchingley (where our pigeon ended up dead). What’s more, when he totted up the number of pigeons in those lofts able to be used by the Eastern Command Pigeon Service, the total ended up very close to the magic number “194” (as in “NURP 40 TW 194“).

So… could TW in fact be Royal Tunbridge Wells? It’s a pretty good question, and may (despite a few apparently showstopping problems) indeed lead us all to a surprisingly good answer.

When I first started thinking about this pigeon story, I also considered Tunbridge Wells as a possibility for “TW”, but the immediate issue is that Bletchingley is simply the wrong side. Would a pigeon flying from the continent overshoot by ten miles, I wondered? Probably not, on balance.

What’s more, racing pigeons lead a simple, cosseted, safe life, and often end up living to an age of ten or more: which means that the number of newly-ringed pigeons per year in those Tunbridge Wells lofts would probably only need to be 20 or 30 (say, 40 max), far lower than would be needed to reach 194 in a single year, I would have thought.

And yet, and yet… put all these fragments together, and an entirely different possibility emerges. “TW” or “DK” could very easily be not so much a single town as a regional postcode, a grouping for a whole set of pigeon loft owners over a wide geographic area to share between them. In which case, the extraordinary possibility we should immediately consider is whether the loft to which our pigeon was returning was (whether DK/Dorking or TW/Tunbridge Wells) right in Bletchingley itself – this deceased ex-bird you sold me (etc) might already have been a street or two away from its home. Hence the old adage about most car accidents happening within half a mile of home might well have an unexpectedly pigeony analogue here!

I therefore urge the meticulous and hardworking Mr Hibbs to look again to see if there are any pigeon loft addresses listed far closer to Bletchingley itself. It may be that one of these falls within a “TW” or “DK” pigeon-postcode, something that I didn’t at all expect myself! All the same, before too long I suspect we will have a proper answer as to who the pigeon’s owner was… and he/she might just turn out to live rather closer to Bletchingley’s High Street than one might at first think. 🙂

But today’s bombshell is that I now suspect the Serjeant’s name was not “W Stott” but “W Stout” – having enhanced the image above like crazy this last day, this now seems a marginally more likely reading. Yet the Allied forces seem to have had only a single Serjeant (definitely with a ‘j’) William Stout 3650400 from St Helens in Lancashire in 253 Field Company of the Royal Engineers, who died on 6th June 1944 aged 37. His grave is 1. C. 11 in Hermanville War Cemetery in Calvados, Normandy: he was the son of William and Margaret Stout, and husband of Ursula Ann Stout, all of St. Helens.

But that’s as far as straightforward web-searching has taken me – so perhaps a Cipher Mystery reader with helpful database subscriptions might see if there’s anything more we can tell about him? I know you all like a bit of a challenge… 😉

Incidentally, 253 Field Company served in France and Belgium, which would seem to be entirely consistent with what (little) we know so far: the story of much of its war is retold in “Sword of Bone: Phoney War and Dunkirk, 1940” by Anthony Rhodes, which I’ve ordered (of course) – there are copies on Abebooks and elsewhere for only a few pounds, if you are interested.

Is it Stott or Stout? The jury’s out! 🙂

Dead WW2 cipher pigeon timeline…

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It’s been a busy day here at Cipher Mysteries Mansion, with loads of people making suggestions via comments to my first dead pigeon webpage and my second dead cipher pigeon webpage.

I’ll try to bring all the pieces together into a single dead pigeon timeline, with a few additional thoughts to flesh out the gaps. But the first place to start is with a contrast-enhanced highish-res scan of the page (click on it to see a bigger version)

The contextual evidence we have to help us reconstruct a story is actually quite large:-
* The pigeon appears to have been coming back from France, in a line from Paris to Dieppe to Bletchingley to Twickenham
* The message was not sent in 1939 (because one of the pigeons was ringed in 1940)
* The “Sjt” seems to imply that this was sent by an RAF airman “W Stott” (though opinions differ on this)
* The note is addressed to “X02”, which I believe was Bomber Command in High Wycombe, Bucks
* Two pigeons were sent back to X02 carrying (presumably) the same message
* RAF bombers used to carry a pair of pigeons in case of emergency
* The note has two different inks (blue and black)
* The note is written in two different hands (Stott’s and a possibly French hand)

The first thing to look closely at is the very top line, which seems to have evaded everyone’s notice:-

I think this could well be “110”, for “110 Squadron”. The history of 110 squadron is that it was based at RAF Wattisham in East Anglia until 17 March 1942, before departing to India for the remainder of the war – so if this “110” indicates “110 Squadron”, it would have been before 17 March 1942 (which is entirely consistent with what we know).

As mentioned above, “X02” apparently denoted Bomber Command in High Wycombe. But I suspect this tells us a great deal: for if we have an RAF airman sending a pair of enciphered messages by pigeon from France to Bomber Command, this perhaps points to a bomber having crashed in France or Belgium – and up until March 1942, 110 Squadron flew Bristol Blenheim IV bombers.

There are three numbers on the image in the two hands, which I would suggest tell a very specific story. The first hand is RAF airman W Stott’s: these indicate a time of origin of 15:22 and a time of completion of 15:25 (perhaps on the 6th of the month). Whereas to my eyes the other hand looks French, with “lib.” almost certainly short for “lib[éré]“, released. But what is most convincing to me is that this is 16:25 French time – an hour ahead of British time.

The two pigeon ring references here refer to “NURP” (the National Union of Racing Pigeons), ringed in [19]”40″ and [19]”37″, and from “TW” (for which Twickenham is my best guess) and DK (which, as Matt Peskett points out, was probably Dorking rather than Denmark Hill). I’m pretty sure that I’ve read we’re looking at NURP 40 TW 194, which would have been the 194th pigeon ringed in 1940 by its Twickenham owner: which perhaps points to either a very large pigeon loft or a pigeon ringed late in the year (or perhaps a bit of both). Put it all together, and I suspect this means we can discount the first half of 1940.

My shaky inference is therefore that we could well be looking at a message from a RAF Bristol Blenheim IV bomber from 110 Squadron (“110Sq”) [possibly crash-] landed in Northern France after June 1940 and before 17 March 1942, not far from a line running through Dieppe and Paris. I’ve asked the Blenheim Society about this, let’s see if they can help!

Dead WW2 pigeon – a ring of truth?

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Some further notes on our poor plucky pigeon with his red Bakelite cipher payload.

People have been leaving some very interesting comments here, presumably spurred into action by today’s BBC piece on the mysterious bird. Moshe Rubin and Keoghly independently pointed out that “27” is a check figure to confirm that the sheet should contain 27 blocks of encrypted letters (as indeed it does), and both say that this was “standard fare for crypto“; while Keoghly adds that “1525/6 is likely [a reference] to [the] one time pad/offset used“. Bob Yeldham also helpfully notes that “the 37 & 40 on the rings denotes the year the bird was ringed that’s assuming the correct year ring was used, ringing was usually done 7 days after hatching.” Thanks to all of you!

What is also nice is that plenty of people seem to have rushed off to buy copies of Leo Marks’ very enjoyable book “Between Silk & Cyanide”, one of the best code-related books ever written, I’d say (even if some people have since asserted that Marks may have been an unreliable witness). Read it with care, for sure, but definitely read it! 🙂

I also ought to add my own thoughts from the last few weeks… and perhaps there’s an answer of sorts hidden in there.

My first reaction (that it might be a poem code sent from Douai early in the war) didn’t really stand up to analysis – having played with this in an Excel spreadsheet, I don’t think any kind of pure transposition is going to jump out from it. Though it resembles a poem code, Leo Marks specifically describes SoE’s sending cryptograms later in the war (particularly towards D-Day) that resembled the earlier poem codes, mainly to mislead Axis codebreakers: but by then Marks had (so he said) managed to persuade The Powers That Be to use one-time pads which were, to all intents and purposes, uncrackable then – or now, for that matter.

Having said that, what interests me (as an historian) is what we can tell from the rest of the message. For example, we know that the same message was sent back to the UK on two different pigeons, both of whose owners were members of the National Union of Racing Pigeons – “NURP 40 TW 194” (our dead pigeon) and “NURP 37 DK 76”. Yet we still have no word from the Racing Pigeon magazine (who presumably have all manner of racing-pigeon-related archives) on who those owners were, or where they lived.

Yet I think we can make a sensible guess at what happened here!

The message was addressed to X02, which (I believe) was Bomber Command in High Wycombe, Bucks (of which my aunt was once Mayor, incidentally), so it’s likely that we’re looking for locations in South-East England not too far from there. Hence I’ve already noted that our pigeon’s “TW” owner id could well have meant “Twickenham”, while similarly “DK” could very easily have been “Denmark Hill”. And we also know that the pigeon ended up in the chimney of David Martin’s house in Bletchingley (near Redhill) on its way home.

So let’s put it all into Google Maps and trace a possibly Twickenham-based pigeon backwards in time as the crow pigeon flies:-

If I’m right that “TW” is Twickenham (and it could just as easily be “Thomas Wilson”, I know, I know), then I think what we have here could be a pigeon flying back from Dieppe to Twickenham via Bletchingley. And one of the most [in]famous missions of WW2 was the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942, which went just about as badly as could be feared. So… could this have contained a desperate message sent back to Bomber Command to get help from the air on that dreadful occasion? Of all the possible scenarios discussed for our mystery pigeon’s journey, perhaps this is the one that has a (if you’ll forgive my pigeon-related pun) ring of truth!

Update: having said all that, if you follow the same line directly into the heart of France you hit Paris almost directly. Dieppe just happens to be the nearest point to Britain: all the same, until anyone knows any better, my pet name for this dead pigeon is going to be “Johnny Dieppe”, I hope nobody minds too much. 😉

Wired article on the Copiale Cipher…

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With a tip of the hat to Dave Oranchak’s zodiackillerciphers.com (where I saw it mentioned), the cipher news du jour is that hyperbullish tech magazine Wired has just posted a nice article giving the inside story on how the various collaborators all played their part in cracking the Copiale Cipher (which I covered here and here). I particularly relished the picture of the Oculist blindfold (a blindfold with lenses? Really?), but everyone’s different, right?

Anyway, no need for any more snarky comments from me, it’s a perfectly good article, so go and enjoy it! 🙂

Dead pigeon sparks WW2 cipher mystery…

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A grateful tip of the hat to Zodiac Killer Cipher Meister Dave Oranchak, for passing me a lovely little story in the Daily Mail (and now many other newspapers) about a plucky Second World War carrier pigeon found dead in a Surrey chimney. So far so mundane (there were 250,000 in the Royal Pigeon Service, and many failed to reach home): but what sets this particular one well apart was that it was carrying an enciphered message.

My transcription of the message looks like this (where there’s ambiguity, I’ve included the possibilities in square brackets, though I’d recommend sticking with the first of each set):-

AOAKN HVPKD FNFJ[W/U] YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX
PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH .
NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB A[K/R/H]EEQ
UAOTA . RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH
LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ .
KLDTS GQIR[U/W] AOAKN 27 1525/6.

The first and last group (both “AOAKN”) almost certainly denote a key reference, a feature common to many cipher systems. The “27 1525/6” bit is probably not part of the code but a military reference of some sort – I’d predict day of current month (27th) & time of day (3.25pm). It also seems vaguely possible that the dots delimit sentences, but they could just as easily be bits of dirt. 😉 According to Geoff here, SOE started the war with poem codes (see Leo Marks’ “Between Silk And Cyanide”) moved to various double transposition systems after 1942 (Marks joined SOE in 1942), before moving to one time pads in 1943 (see Marks’ Appendix Two): so if it can be proved to be something like a Playfair cipher (as Geoff suspects from a number of repeated bigrams), a tentative date would seem to be 1942.

As for me, I’m rather taken by the poem cipher system (most famous of which was Violette Szabo’s poem: “The life that I have / Is all that I have / And the life that I have / Is yours“), which p.11 of Marks describes as:-

“An agent had to choose five words at random from his poem and give each letter of these words a number. He then used these numbers to jumble and juxtapose his clear text. To let his Home Station know which five words he had chosen, he inserted an indicator-group at the start of his message.”

Hence my guess is that “AOAKN” are the initial letters of the five words in the SOE agent’s poem which (in the early part of the war) was often by Shakespeare or even Edgar Allan Poe (though probably not “The Raven”, as no word in the first section begins with ‘K’, bah!). Furthermore, “HVPKD” could well be a nonsense five letter set (as this was one of the tricks SOE told its agents to use to improve security on what was otherwise a fairly brittle code). (Incidentally, my favourite bit of “Between Silk & Cyanide” is Chapter 20 “The Findings of the Court”, where Marks finally gets to meet his hero John Tiltman). All the same (as you’ve probably guessed), the single message was have here may well be far too small a sample to break with confidence, without some kind of historical deus ex machina to help us out. That, or a really good guess at a poem (but hopefully not the one about Charles De Gaulle). 🙂

Anyway, back to our plucky-dead-Surrey-chimney pigeon. Below the cipher section, the transmission sheet notes that two copies were sent at “1522” (presumably the time of day again), and there are also two markings:
* NURP 40 TW 194
* NURP 37 DK 76
It turns out that these are the reference numbers of the two pigeons (the dead one is the first one). Remember that thirty two pigeons were awarded the Dickin Medal (the animal version of the Victoria Cross) in WW2, so this was a serious business! Kenley Lass (NURP.36.JH.190) was one of the 32, as was Dutch Coast (NURP.41.A.2164), Commando (NURP.38.EGU.242), Royal Blue (NURP.40.GVIS.453), and Mary (NURP.40.WCE.249). Moreover, “NURP” stands for the “National Union of Racing Pigeons”, so these were all NURP-affiliated pigeons, as was the dead pigeon itself.

Interestingly, Royal Blue was a blue cock pigeon, owned by King George VI at his Royal Pigeon Lofts at Sandringham: hence “GVIS” was short for “George VI Sandringham”, while the “40” means that the pigeon was entered into the database in 1940. Hence “NURP 40 TW 194” could not have been sent before 1940, because 1940 was when its little pigeon-y war began. Also: TW would have been the reference for the pigeon’s club (perhaps Twickenham?) or individual owner. Doubtless someone at The Racing Pigeon Magazine has already worked this out, so perhaps they’re holding it back to announce at the Racing Pigeon Show in Telford on 24th November 2012, who knows? 🙂

Yet according to the New York Times, though, pigeon NURP 40 TW 194’s remains were first found in 1982 but – according to Colin Hill, Bletchley Park’s go-to-guy for pigeon history – the mystery here is that neither pigeon’s reference number appears in any pigeon archive listing. Dnn dnn daaaaah!

Other useful information: the message was addressed to “X02” (the code for Bomber Command) and the sender was apparently “W Stott Sjt”, i.e. Sergeant W. Stott, where the fact that Sergeant was written “Sjt” rather than “Sgt” may possibly imply that he was in the RAF (opinions differ on this). A quick database search yielded two good candidates: “Sergeant William Gordon Stott” (1232159 in RAF’s Volunteer Reserve 13 Squadron, died in 1942, buried in Beja War Cemetery, Tunisia) and “Sergeant William Leslie Stott” (508080 in the RAF, died in 1945 aged 35, buried in Chester’s Overleigh Cemetery).

I also found out the history of 13 Squadron:
* 1939 – Odiham, Hants
* October 1939 – Mons-en-Chausseé (mainly photographic reconaissance)
* May 1940 – Douai (bombing frontline troop positions)
* June 1940 – Hooton Park, Cheshire (anti-submarine patrols, Lincolnshire & Irish Sea)
* July 1941 – Odiham, Hants (dropping smoke screens to cover paratrooper drops & gliders)
* November 1942 – Blida, Algeria (bombing airfields and troop groupings)
* [???] 1943 – Protville II, Tunisia (shipping protection)
* October 1943 – Sidi Ahmed, then Sidi Amor
* December 1943 – Kabrit, Egypt
* September 1945 – Hassani
* April 1946 – squadron was disbanded.

The nice thing that has historians ooh-ing and aah-ing is that the kind of red Bakelite canister containing the message was apparently only used by SOE, the Special Operations Executive where Marks worked. Note that even though Stott’s name doesn’t appear on the (now-deleted) list of SOE agents on the Internet, that doesn’t really mean a lot, as it is woefully incomplete.

So… what does it say? To me, the likeliest story seems to be that it was sent by an SOE agent in Douai in early 1940, using a pair of pigeons brought there by 13 Squadron, and using just the kind of poem code Leo Marks fought hard to get rid of. Yet I can’t help wondering whether the comment left by “MrEdTheTalkingHorse” on the Daily Telegraph’s webpage is correct, and that “Perhaps it was helping von Stauffenberg plot a coo.”

PS: if you don’t believe any of this, here’s a nice picture of a RAF guy with a pigeon. Aaah.

PPS: a pigeon sketch I found online (but can’t now find a link to, sorry)
Tim Brooke-Taylor: Look, a carrier pigeon with a message tied to its leg!
John Cleese: What does it say?
TBT: It says .. “this is the leg of a carrier pigeon”.
JC: Turn it over, I think there’s something written on the back!
TBT: So there is! It says .. “this is the back of a carrier pigeon”.
JC: Is that it?
TBT: No, wait, there’s a PS!
JC: What does it say?
TBT: Pssss.

PPPS: …and of course the story has been Slashdotted already. Yes, “Drink more ovaltine” gets yet another airing by a plucky flamebaiter there. Hats off to Slashdotters!

Update: for more recent Cipher Mysteries updates to this story, there is a “ring of truth” post and a dead pigeon timeline post, with highish-resolution images of the enciphered message.

Yet more Voynich novels…

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Does the world need yet more Voynich Manuscript-themes novels? Errrrm… obviously it does, or else why would so many of them be parachuting down out of a clear blue sky?

First up in today’s list is H. L. Dennis’ “Secret Breakers: The Power of Three”. Even though this is a kid’s book, between you and me it’s actually a jolly good read, with lots of Bletchley-Park-Station-X and mint-imperial-crunching-British-code-breaker stuff threaded throughout it, like so much Csjhiupo Spdl. My 8-year-old son enjoyed it so much that he’ll be posting a review of it here soon. All you need to know for now is that the ending sets up book two with Edward Elgar: so, Dorabella here we come! 😉

Next up is Linda Lafferty’s “The Bloodletter’s Daughter” – this 480-page heft weaves the Voynich Manuscript’s threads in with the even more obscure (and, actually, far bloodier) story of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II’s mad son Don Julius. There’s a copy right beside my desk waiting to be read… I just wish I didn’t have so much actual cipher research to do at the moment. But I promise I’ll get there (eventually)… oh well!

Finally, R. J. Scott’s “Book Of Secrets – Oracle 2” is due for release at the end of the month, though I get the feeling that it may not make a lot of sense unless you’ve already read the first book (“Oracle”).

Enjoy! @-) <--- belated Wenlock smiley 😉

Voynich-inspired art exhibition…

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OK, let me try a Cipher Mysteries-themed mind-reading trick on you…

Perhaps you feel in the mood for a mooch around an art exhibition where all the pictures are inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, but you’d prefer to stay at home than catch a plane all the way to Ireland?

Well, if my mind-reading skills are on the mark, I can surely do no better than suggest the one-man show by Damien Flood called “The Theatre of the World” currently on display at Ormston House in Limerick, running until 27th October 2012. The blurb runs:-

“Through researching the Voynich Manuscript, Flood became interested in how people throughout the ages have created their own worlds in order to understand the one around them. The artist similarly uses paint to create a new place to situate the viewer and to give them a feeling of journeying through a new or parallel world that mixes micro and macro, the botanical and the astrological, and inner and outer consciousness. The paintings in Theatre of the World ask to be studied, for the viewer to take their time and allow each individual mystery to unfurl.

This body of work was developed for the the Italian-inspired architecture of Ormston House and with the building’s illustrious history of functions and uses in mind: a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ to question technological acceleration and our insatiable appetite for data consumption. These modern landscapes are not cryptic messages however, the ideas are explicitly present on the canvas and the implications beyond the frame highlight a loosening grip on our understanding of the physical world and our rejection of intuitive perception in favour of dubious scientific absolutism. The paintings are conversations (figurative and abstract) on the dichotomy between our understanding of the civilised world versus our understanding of nature, between fact and fiction and the slippages in-between.”

But wait! The neat bit is that there’s a four-minute video on YouTube taken walking around Flood’s exhibition. Hence the part about not catching a plane. Enjoy (virtually)!

Hypatia Pickens’ Voynich-inspired 3d art…

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Every once in a while, I get accosted by something delightfully tangential to the while cipher mysteries arena. A nice example of this recently popped up as part of the University of Western Australia’s Second Life (a well-known online virtual world) presence, where a certain ‘Hypatia Pickens’ built herself a Voynich-themed area, with odd-looking plants and nymphs sliding down a curious slide into the cool water.

Naturally, that’s not the real story here, not when the question I immediately wanted answered was “who is Hypatia Pickens, exactly?”

It turns out Hypatia’s real name is Sarah Higley; she teaches medieval literature at the University of Rochester; she wrote a 2007 book on Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua Ignota (which I wonder whether my friend Philip Neal has yet seen); she has created a conlang (constructed language) called Teonaht; and she created the (largely satirical) Star Trek character Reginald Barclay.

All of which probably serves to explain her interest in the Voynich Manuscript, which is surely – if you believe all you read on the Internet – nothing less than a medieval constructed lingua ignota invented by aliens… specifically Ferengi (simply because the world is itself a lovable medieval Arabic term meaning Franks). 🙂

Review: “Rebel Gold” By Warren Getler & Bob Brewer…

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Now here’s something that’s a bit unusual: “Rebel Gold” by Warren Getler and Bob Brewer (originally titled “Shadows of the Sentinel”) is a book about codes and buried treasure with basically no actual codes and pretty much zero treasure. Yet at the same time, there’s so much (alleged) secret American history and related odd stuff bubbling from nearly every page that I found it hard to mind very much.

At its core, the book is no more than a loose record of Bob Brewer’s treasure-huntin’ exploits in them thar woods, an’ yuh’d have to say he sure ain’t foun’ hisself a whole lot of gold. Yet the real gold he seems to have uncovered is the mostly-secret history of what are essentially the book’s real heroes (or antiheroes, depending on how you look at it) – the Knights of the Golden Circle (AKA the “KGC”).

The way I read it, the KGC was merely one of several haphazardly-run pro-slavery activist wings of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. The Wikipedia KGC page asserts that it somehow morphed into the “Order of American Knights” and then again in 1864 when it became “the Order of the Sons of Liberty”, but these could just as easily have been parallel wings, sharing a handful of key people.

What emerges from Brewer’s book is a rather deeper & broader conspiracy, with the KGC ending up with a number of concealed gold-stuffed stockpiles which its loyal descendants (including some in Brewer’s own family) apparently continue to guard even now. These modern-day sentinels stay loyal to the cause just in case the people of the South are ever to rise again and need financial supportin’ for their insurrection (and what with the price of gold bein’ at such a crazily high level, whose to say it wouldn’t be a help).

Overall, my favourite part of the book is Chapter 7, “Jesse James, KGC field commander“, which builds up a beautiful alternate history for Jesse James as a KGC operative, whose stealin’ was an innately political act – and that there were simultaneously two Jesse James (Jesse Robert James and his first cousin Jesse Woodson James), both of whom also had a brother called Frank, and all four of whom were part of the KGC. (Are you following all this? See me after class if it’s not crystal clear.)

And really, what goes for chapter 7 holds for the whole book, in that I can’t possibly evaluate the whole, ummm, veridicality of this mess (“Jesse James Was One Of His Names”, really?), but I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. In my opinion, it’s definitely a must-read for lovers of tangled conspiratorial Americana. Just don’t expect to use it to guide yuh metal detectorin’, hoss! 🙂

Review: The Voynich Cypher

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While accidentally reading John Grisham’s “Theodore Boone” the other day, what struck me the most was the sheer laziness of the characterization. In particular, Boone’s uncle came across to me a paint-by-numbers Donald Sutherland part – the whole failed-lawyer-looking-for-redemption-through-a-younger-man’s-action thing, if you remember Time To Kill. Kind of set my teeth on edge right from near the start: not good, not good at all.

Similarly, the moment that the female lead in Russell Blake’s The Voynich Cypher appears wearing a “skin-tight black jumpsuit crafted from suede that left little to the imagination and calf-height black leather boots boasting four-inch heels” was the precise moment that the author left me behind. It’s not exaggerated, it’s not comic, it’s just lame, big-stylee. It’s not even Angelina Jolie (who would be too tall for the part).

Don’t get me wrong, I like independent writing and independent publishing: but there’s only so heavy a storm of genre clichés I can weather before I just want to shut the door on the lot of them. And on those terms, this was a perfect storm.

Yet even though other writers seem hugely comfortable with The Good Conspiracy Vs The Bad Conspiracy plot structure virtually all such modern cipher thrillers seem to roll out, here it’s handled without much finesse. In fact, if I were to say that it came across to me as a kind of Poundland remake of The Da Vinci Code with the Voynich Manuscript spliced in awkwardly, rest assured that that wouldn’t be giving away the plot.

As far as the writing goes, only one line stands out in the whole book (a bakery-related semi-gag on p.230, *sigh*), which quickly turns out to be no more than a clumsy artifice for introducing the young-sexy-woman-gets-it-on-with-the-older-man-despite-their-daunting-age-gap cliché. How many times have I read that? More to the point, how many more times will I have to endure it?

Sure, you might possibly like The Voynich Cypher, it’s certainly a quick’n’easy read… but personally, I just didn’t get it. Then again, I thought Fifty Shades of Whatever was, ummm, pants, so what do I know? 🙂