Even before I skimmed through the blurb for Janice Hallett’s The Twyford Code, a blurb on the back cover caught my eye and imagination. It described this book as “Enid Blyton meets Agatha Christie”, which is essentially literary catnip for a mystery nut.

While Dame Agatha’s presence is still felt in many good ol’ fashioned juicy whodunnits today, Enid Blyton is someone I hadn’t thought of in decades. For many of us, Blyton was a staple read during childhood, filled with delicious adventures and exciting foods, all done without much adult supervision. Today, while she may still be pretty popular, she’s very much a relic of a world that most children – and even adults – would neither recognise nor relate to. A lot of her work is now seen as problematic given our current sensibilities, especially in terms of the uncomfortable reductive stereotyping and bigotry. So much so, that some of her characters have either been left out of the books or have had their names changed. To be fair, Christie has been accused of these things too, but she has endured, even if (or perhaps because) Kenneth Branagh insists on making Poirot an action hero.

Despite these issues, I can separate the art from the artist (i.e., selective suppression of all the squirmy bits) and still think fondly of Blyton and the countless hours of joy she provided to me and millions of kids during those halcyon days.

Why am I waxing nostalgic about Enid Blyton? Well, because one of the central characters of The Twyford Code is modelled after her – a prolific writer of children’s books named Edith Twyford who wrote a popular war-time mystery series called the Super Six featuring kids who run around the British countryside solving mysteries. Edith Twyford had fallen out of favour in later decades for pretty much the same reasons that Enid Blyton’s work is now considered problematic.

The Twyford Code follows the story of an ex-con called Steven Smith recently released from jail. He’s consumed by the mysterious disappearance of his favourite teacher Miss Iles nearly 40 years ago and only has a hazy recollection of what happened. After his release, he’s trying to piece it all together.

The entire series of events is set off in the early ’80s, starting with Steve (around 14 years old at the time) finding a copy of one of Edith Twyford’s novels in a bus with all kinds of writing in the margins. Steve probably has dyslexia and is not able to read very well, and so is part of a remedial English class with five other kids taught by Miss Iles, who discovers that he has the book.

Edith Twyford’s books have been banned in schools by this point, but Miss Iles reads it to them and is visibly excited by the writing in the margins. She arranges a class field trip to, among other places, Edith Twyford’s home – and ends up disappearing that day.

After his release, Steve is convinced that the book he found had something to do with this. He starts to revisit his old classmates to gather information about what happened that day and with the help of a young librarian named Lucy finds that Twyford’s books may contain coded messages.

I’m not going to give out any more plot details because they will end up being spoilers, but suffice it to say that it becomes an edge-of-the-seat hunt for answers. Parts of this hunt reminded me a lot of that movie, National Treasure. There’s definitely some Deus ex machina stuff in the plotline to move the story along, but you get over it, particularly when you get to the big finale.

Hallett has also touched upon a few burning social issues, including the links between poverty, illiteracy, and crime. That so many children from poorer families are failed by the education system is something that really resonates given how online schooling during the pandemic has disproportionately impacted kids from lower-income families.

The plot is very engaging, with plenty of twists and turns, but it’s the format of the book that really sets it apart. Hallett has written this book as a series of 200 text files transcribed from Steve’s voice recordings found on an old iPhone 4, instead of the more traditional set paragraphs and dialogue. I don’t know why the iPhone 4 was specifically chosen – it may have worked with any phone, I’m guessing, especially since the setting for this is 2019. The transcriptions were sent to Steve’s son by a police inspector, who had found the phone after Steve himself went missing.

On a sidenote, I also found the format interesting because at the time, I was on the hunt for a decent voice-to-text transcription tool myself. Fate!? Nope, just happenstance.

Since these are transcriptions, Hallett has introduced some of the problems you would expect to get from voice-to-text: words that have been misspelt or misinterpreted, words and sentences that are missing, and so on. Normally, typos and wrongly used words would drive me to distraction, but here, since you already expect it, reading and understanding them is not difficult at all. Honestly, I was just blown away by how well the author managed to make these “mistakes” consistently and still make the book incredibly enjoyably and well-written.

Though I must confess, at places it does get a bit tedious and I had to read certain parts several times – out loud in some cases – to figure out what was being said. Some parts may also be a little difficult for those not familiar with how Cockney rhyming slang works.

The other aspect of the book that was really impressive was the code itself. If you like puzzles, you’re going to enjoy trying to work out the codes yourself. Let me tell you, Hallett does not make it easy – anymore information on this and we’ll be in spoiler territory.

To design the code, she’s not only had to write the main story, but also bits and pieces of the stories of the fictional author as well. Some of these issues have made me curious about how the audiobook tackles them, since the codes and misinterpretations are so visual.

All in all, The Twyford Code is a fantastic and engaging read.

(Ranjana Sundaresan is an F&B analyst and a bookworm)

About the Book

The Twyford Code

Publisher: VIPER, part of Serpent’s Tail

First published: 2022

Number of pages: 359

Price: INR799

Check out the book on Amazon here

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