Armchair sleuths will be drawn to THE BAFFLE BOOK: FIFTEEN FIENDISHLY CHALLENGING DETECTIVE PUZZLES like flies to a rotting corpse. Originally published in 1913, Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay’s book offers 15 mini-mysteries and asks you to determine the solution.
The clues are there, sometimes seen in maps, diagrams and other bits of illustrated evidence. The onus of figuring out whodunit and why falls on you, the reader. They suggest taking five to 15 minutes’ time in using your noodle; the answers are printed upside-down at the other end of the book.
Intrigued by this once-popular newspaper feature and party game, I approached THE BAFFLE BOOK as a novelty. The first puzzle – a good-ol’-fashioned murder mystery – was fun and relatively simple to solve once I thought about it. Ditto with the second – in which you are to determine the theft of an item by comparing fingerprints; same with the third, involving a dead body that plummets from an elevated subway train. I could see why this crap caught on about a century ago.
But then things started to get tough. And not tough as in “fiendishly challenging” as the cover boasts, but tough as in you’d have to have been alive in 1913 to be able to solve them. Because some crimes hinge upon things like knowing what the tread of “Vacuum Cup Balloon Tires” looks like or what a “Venita” brand of hairnet is. After several “solutions” like these, I stopped caring about murdered sculptors, forged signatures, runaway horses and Morse code embedded in pantyhose.
Fun at first, then just frustrating once its age starts to show. –Rod Lott
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