The Twyford Code
Janice Hallett's The Twyford Code, published in 2022, is a brilliantly inventive mystery told almost entirely as transcripts of voice memos recorded by Steven Smith, a small-time London criminal in his sixties who has just been released from a long stretch in prison. Smithy, as he is known, is sending the recordings to his estranged son. As a struggling teenager, he had a remedial-English teacher named Miss Iles who once handed him a battered Edith Twyford children's book on a school coach trip. She believed Twyford had hidden a code in her old novels, and a few weeks after the trip, Miss Iles disappeared. Decades later, Smithy decides to find out what really happened to her. Hallett constructs the entire novel out of voice-to-text transcripts, complete with the misheard words and autocorrect glitches that turn the prose into its own running puzzle. Within that constraint, she layers a missing person, a literary conspiracy, an old gangland heist, and a son's grief. The Twyford Code rewards close reading the way a crossword does, and it is one of the most original mysteries to come out of British publishing in years.
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Recently released ex-convict Steven Smith borrows his estranged son's old smartphone and dictates a series of audio files about a school trip in 1983, when his teacher Miss Iles disappeared while reading aloud from a paperback by the fictional 1940s children's author Edith Twyford.
The Twyford Code was written by Janice Hallett and published in 2022. Hallett also wrote The Appeal and The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels. Her novels use experimental formats including emails and audio transcripts.
Yes. The Twyford Code is structured as transcribed audio recordings from a phone, with audio-recognition errors and ambient details intact. The form rewards careful reading. Most readers find it propulsive once they accept the format.
The Twyford Code is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Twyford Code takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Twyford Code is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Twyford Code is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
