Codes and Villains and Mystery: The Best Stories with Codes and Ciphers 1843 - 1920

Codes and ciphers have a long history in fiction. From the first publication of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug" in 1843 through Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" in 1999 and Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" in 2012, cryptology has played a key role in many works of mystery, suspense, and science fiction. Whether it's a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher - the most common cipher found in these stories - or a Playfair, or a book code, or the Enigma, or lately public-key systems, using cryptography and especially cryptanalysis, adds an extra flair to many stories. This anthology brings together fifteen of the most famous and interesting early mystery stories that use cryptograms as integral plot elements. Each story has been annotated, edited and includes an introduction that tells the reader about the author and describes the cipher system used in the story.