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November 8, 2006
One more code from The Boy Detective Fails
Back in May I talked about the codes you can solve in Joe Meno's novel, The Boy Detective Fails. One of the decoded texts ends with an email address. I emailed the address, but never received a reply. A few weeks later I stopped by a talk-back after a performance of the play The Boy Detective Fails and asked Joe Meno himself what was up with that. He said that since the book was still in pre-release, it was likely that no one at the publisher was checking that email yet. So I forgot about it until Kathy asked in a comment if I had solved a further code received from that email address. I sent off an email yesterday and got back a message in code.
So, some hints for solving that code after the jump:
The code in the email is, like the one at the bottom of the pages, a substitution cipher where each letter represents another. But unlike that other code, it's not a simple rotation through the alphabet. Instead, the substitution letters were chosen, it seems, randomly. Basically, we're going to have to start guessing at letters to substitute and then see how those play out. But we've got two big boosts when we start to guess -- the spaces and punctuation have been left in (there are only so many two letter words in English, for example) and our correspondent has signed his full name. So by starting at the end of the message and trickling those decoded letters up through the message, it starts to become like solving a crossword puzzle -- "what's a 5-letter word that ends in 'ing'?".
Oh, and there are two words misspelled. Don't let that drive you crazy.
Posted by Fuzzy at November 8, 2006 1:05 PM
Comments
I just started reading it this morning!
I'm bad at word jumbles.
Posted by: Dan Telfer ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.fuzzyco.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 8, 2006 2:37 PM