Style
Written in rhyme, the book includes large and lavish full-page illustrations of Horace's opulent house and the events of the party, packed with hidden details. The author invites the reader to deduce the identity of the thief by examining the illustrations and making deductions and observations. Also among the details in the illustrations are hidden messages, ciphers, and codes for amateur cryptographers (for example, one page's border consists of Morse code while another page set in the ballroom contains musical clues as to which guest is guilty). The biggest and most noticeable clue lies in a paragraph of ciphertext at the end of the book, which is to be decrypted, once the reader has discovered the identity of the thief, by means of a Caesar cipher mapping A to the first letter of the guilty animal's name. The solution to the cipher confirms the answer to the puzzle and offers an additional challenge to the reader.
The final portion of the book contains the answers to almost all of the clues in the book (including the cipher), and how to solve them. These last pages are sealed together, as the reader is encouraged to try to solve the puzzles themselves first. This sealed section was absent from earlier prints of the book - but was available by mail.
Read more about this topic: The Eleventh Hour (book)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.”
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“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
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“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)