Cipher Mysteries

A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn't a 'crowd', but (rather delightfully) a 'murder' of crows. What, I ...

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!] * * * * * * * The crew were spending the rest of the day on those interminable fly-past shots of the Voynich Manuscript all modern documentary editors demand, their rostrum camera a microlight buzzing across a lightly-inked vellum landscape. But Marina ...

It's funny how two things can have all the same basic ingredients and yet end up wildly different. A Maclaren MP4-12C and a Fiat 500 are both cars: yet few would disagree that they're worlds apart. Similarly, even though Emery Borka has - in Steve Santa and the secret of the Last Parfait - succeeded in producing a novel that ...

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!] * * * * * * * Absent-mindedly dusting breadcrumbs off a beard no longer there, Graydon Harvitz paused in thought at the glass doors of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Was the building a sublime symphony in concrete for keeping ...

What would it feel like to be a footballer with no goal? An actor with no stage? A projector with no screen? Or (finally getting to the point) a pseudohistorian with no infamous historical figure to attach his/her nutty theories onto? All of which is why I feel sorry for poor old Leonardo da Vinci. He barely counts as a genuine ...

Fate dealt Stanley Picker a strange card that day: he just happened to be ambling past the burning library on his way home from work as the rampaging mob surged out into the street pushing trolleys of rare books and manuscripts. Amidst all this mayhem, Stanley only had eyes for the odd little cipher manuscript balanced precariously on top of one ...

Here's something to amuse and infuriate you: an enciphered crossword I devised this morning. Can you solve it? 1 Across & 1 Down: Italian ciphers. (5) Enjoy! PS: yes, the 5x5 square is deliberate, you need to fill the whole thing in. :-)

Just to let you know about a nice little cipher-mystery-themed short story just published on the Daily Science Fiction website: "The Voynich Variations" by Edoardo Albert neatly merges the Voynich Manuscript's inaccessibility with modern orchestral music's inaccessibility, with a magical flourish to tie it all up. Enjoy!

Here comes another book to add to my Big Fat List of Voynich novels: the just-about-released-any-day-now The Cadence of Gypsies by Barbara Casey. It has a fairly straightforward setup: On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written by her birth mother in an unknown language. After years of research she travels ...

OK, much as I deplore the relentless, adulatory stripmining of Leonardo da Vinci's works, I do rather enjoy seeing infra-red images of paintings, glimpsing the construction marks left beneath the surface. And so I have nothing but good things to say about Discovery News' series of infra-red images of Leonardo's "Adoration of the Magi". I like the detailing on the ...