How long does it take to read Between Silk and Cyanide?
Leo Marks
Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks takes about 11 hours 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 14 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1998. 613 pages, about 168,575 words.
23 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 18 hours 44 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 1 minute |
The page count is the median across 14 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British WW2 group infiltrating Reich-dominated Europe, had during the War's early and middle years a continuing problem in certain parts of France. They would train new agents, drop them into French territory, note their contact with a local agent... and they were lost, presumed captured or killed. Two things needed to happen fast: first, a new network had to be built so fresh agents would not be compromised by the older, discovered network. And second, a code generation method must be implemented that did not give a field agent knowledge of how other field agents generated similar messages into encrypted form (knowledge that could be extracted by torture). The answer to the second problem was called a "one time pad", a method still in use today and which had life-saving results almost immediately in the Allied war effort.
Subjects: Biography, British Personal narratives, Cryptographers, Cryptography, Great Britain, Personal narratives, British
