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Bletchley Park Brainteasers

The World War II Codebreakers Who Beat the Enigma Machine— And More Than 100 Puzzles and Riddles That Inspired Them

By: Sinclair McKay

Have a knack for mastering Morse code? Want to discover whether your crossword hobby might have seen you recruited into the history books? Think you could have contributed to the effort to crack the Nazis' infamous Enigma code? Then this book about Bletchley Park— the top-secret home of British World War II cryptographers— was custom-made for you.

When scouring the population for codebreakers, Bletchley Park recruiters left no stone unturned. As well as approaching the country's finest mathematicians, they cast their nets much wider, interviewing musicians, chess masters, poets, linguists, hieroglyphics experts, and high-society debutantes, fresh from finishing school on the Continent. To assess the puzzle-solving capacity of these individuals, the recruiters devised various ingenious mind-twisters— hidden codes, cryptic crosswords, secret languages, and complex riddles. These puzzles, together with the fascinating recruitment stories that surround them, are contained in this book, endorsed by Bletchley Park itself.

Though they had diverse backgrounds, the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were united in their love of a good puzzle. If you are of the same persuasion, put your mental agility to the test with the fiendishly challenging puzzles on these pages and ask yourself: Would Bletchley Park have recruited YOU?