The Typing Pool

A letter left the ministry that should never have left it. Nobody signed it, but the machine that typed it can be read off the page — a chipped e, a carriage that rides high — so you know exactly which typewriter did it. What you do not know is who was sitting at it.

The pool was reorganized. Machines go downstairs to be serviced and come back to a different desk; the women get moved along with them. So the question is a grid: which machine stood on which desk, and who sat there.

It is a quarter past five. The typists went home at five, so not one of them can simply be asked. But the charwoman, the night porter and the canteen watched that pool all day. You are Sarah Wessen, and you can knock on any door in the building. Every call costs you twenty-five minutes, and the last collection is at eight.

Schmiss comes along for free, and he is the one telling you all this. He never says who. He says how many of three of them have been up past a particular landing, or where a trail stops — and none of those is a name, and all of them together are.

WHERE TO START
• Learn it — six lessons, one idea each, smallest first.
• Today's case — a new building every morning. Everyone gets the same one.
• The rest of them — twelve cases, from three desks to six, easy to unpleasant.
• Something longer — Der Rückstand, a free early sample of the bigger game: walk the ministry, question the people in it, and write Sarah's report to Kommissar Mauser with the evidence for every part.

Every case is constructed and proved solvable without guessing before it ships.

WHOSE DOG IS THIS
Sarah Wessen and Schmiss come from the crime novels of Gudrun Leyendecker, born in Bonn in 1948, and are used with her permission. In the books, Schmiss is the narrator, and everything he says between calls here is hers: thirteen lines quoted from the first novel. The game is not the books. If you like the pair of them, the novels are where they actually live: Schmiss und Wessen (Books on Demand, 2025).

HOW IT WAS MADE
The Typing Pool was designed by one person as a present for the novelist Gudrun Leyendecker, and set among her characters with her permission. The puzzles, the building, the rules of what a witness may say and what makes a clue worth having were worked out by hand, and every case is proven solvable without guessing before it ships. The code was written with AI assistance, as were most of the translations; the pictures in the sampler are AI-generated drafts, except that every ruled line and mark on the documents is drawn by a small program of our own. Schmiss's lines and the characters are Gudrun Leyendecker's.

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