THE AUTHOR

A. J. Cardew

A. J. Cardew has been taking puzzles apart since he was a boy, chasing the cryptograms in the back pages of the newspaper, the ones set in tiny gray ink that nobody else bothered with. The crime came later. What drew him in were the long cases where the whole story turns on a single detail in a witness statement that doesn't hold.

He studied mathematics and now teaches technology, and that background runs through everything he makes: MURDCRYPT is built on real ciphers, not decoration. Across the series he has designed and hand-verified a hundred and fifty cipher puzzles spanning ten classical methods, from the Caesar shift and Atbash to columnar transposition, the Vigenere cipher, and the 1586 Babington nomenclator, the code that sent Mary, Queen of Scots, to the block.

Every case follows one rule: a real cipher, five suspects, and one lie hidden in the code. Crack it, catch the contradiction, name the killer. The puzzles are made to be solved by hand and tested until each has exactly one answer. No filler, no fake difficulty. His shelves lean heavy on Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and the biographies of wartime codebreakers, and there is more black coffee on his desk than there should be.

MURDCRYPT, Dossier 01 is his debut, after years of cases written for the desk drawer. He runs the code-breaking game at murdcrypt.com, writes there about the codes that changed history, and publishes the full case dossiers through Artiverse Creations. Dossier 02 is in preparation.

Write to the desk: [email protected]