Mulholland Books Cipher Contest Answer

If you entered the Mulholland Books S. Cipher Contest you should have heard if you were a winner.

I was not, mainly because I am from the UK and was ineligible to enter ! However I did submit an entry and received an email to say that I was not a winner but had solved the cipher correctly. As the answer is now published on the Mulholland website I think we are safe to post the answer here as well.

The clue in the original question was of course "Follow these lines, from first to last, and play fair" so like in the book you take the first and last letters of the passages in the tweets - MC FR NM SH XM CS - and feed the result into a play fair cipher.

For the grid code word you need to use the next part of the clue "the bearded sailor sees all", the bearded sailor in S. is of course Maelstrom, which gives us this grid

MAELS
TROBC
DFGHI
KNPQU
VWXYZ

Using the Playfair cipher rules the result is - ST RA KA LI VE SZ, which gives us the answer "Straka Lives" (The z is a filler letter)

If you don't know the rules of Playfair, then there is this online version you can use to decode the message.

So apart from a bit of fun is this another clue ?

If you won the competition we would love to hear from you especially once you have claimed your prize and had your lunch with J J Abrams and Doug Dorst.

***UPDATE

We have heard from the winner, Kris from the BOLO Books website, he won and has had his lunch with Doug Dorst and J J Abrams.

Read all about his experience of this and the talk at Symphony Space on his BOLO Books write-up