Crime, Mystery & Thriller Fiction Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which fictional police inspector, a lonely, diabetic, opera-loving officer in the small town of Ystad in southern Sweden, broods over failing relationships, a difficult father and the sense that his once-safe country is coming apart?

Question 2

Which 2003 thriller begins with a curator shot in the Louvre, who spends his last minutes arranging his body and leaving coded clues, and sends an American symbol expert and a French cryptographer on an overnight chase through Paris and London pursued by an albino monk?

Question 3

Which fictional detective, a short, shabby, round-faced English Catholic priest who is forever losing his umbrella, solves crimes through sympathy with the criminal and the knowledge of human wickedness he has gained hearing confessions?

Question 4

Which fictional sleuth is a gentle, gossipy, white-haired old lady of a small English village, forever knitting, whom the police and her own nephew tend to underestimate until she quietly names the culprit?

Question 5

What is the name for the gentle subgenre in which the violence happens offstage, the sleuth is usually an amateur and often an older woman, the setting is a village or other small closed community, and order is reassuringly restored at the end with no gore or sex along the way?

Question 6

Which 1923 novel, its author's first, opens with a nervous little architect finding the body of an unknown man, naked except for a gold pince-nez, in the bath of his London flat, while across town a famous financier has vanished?

Question 7

Which 1987 novel is narrated by a chief deputy prosecutor who is assigned to investigate the rape and murder of a colleague, then finds the evidence pointing at himself and is put on trial, having hidden that he had been having an affair with the victim?

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About Crime, Mystery & Thriller Fiction

This quiz is about crime, mystery and thriller fiction: the detective novels, spy stories, courtroom dramas and psychological suspense that have kept readers up late for nearly two centuries, the sleuths and villains who star in them, the writers who built the field, and the subgenre labels critics hang on it. Eighty questions, each describing a book, a character, an author or a term, and asking you to name it from four choices, then explaining it. Only world-class material is used.

The first pack covers the origins and the Golden Age: Poe's Rue Morgue, Wilkie Collins, the arrival of Sherlock Holmes and the stories that killed and revived him, Agatha Christie's Poirot and Marple landmarks from Styles to And Then There Were None, The Mousetrap, Father Brown, Lord Peter Wimsey, the Detection Club and its fair-play rules, and the locked-room puzzle.

The second pack runs from the hardboiled school to the modern bestseller: Hammett's Spade and Continental Op, Chandler's Marlowe, Cain, Highsmith's Ripley, le Carre's Smiley, Fleming's Bond, Simenon's Maigret, The Day of the Jackal, The Ipcress File, The Third Man, the two Hannibal Lecter novels, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Da Vinci Code, Gone Girl, the legal thrillers of Grisham and Turow, Clancy and Ludlum, Sayers's Oxford novel, and the detectives Cadfael, Morse, Rebus, Wallander, Martin Beck and Perry Mason, closing with In Cold Blood.

The third pack is the vocabulary: whodunit, red herring, MacGuffin, the inverted mystery, the cosy, hardboiled, noir, Nordic noir, the police procedural, the legal thriller, the Edgar and Dagger awards, the Strand Magazine, Dupin, the Continental Op, Lew Archer, Mike Hammer, V. I. Warshawski, Cormoran Strike, the unreliable narrator and Chekhov's gun.

It reaches beyond the English-speaking world where the writing is genuinely world-class: Simenon's Paris, the Martin Beck and Wallander novels from Sweden, Larsson's trilogy, Eco-style historical mystery, a Soviet investigator in a frozen Moscow park, and Botswana's first lady detective. Novels, whole series, recurring sleuths and the field's own jargon all appear as answers.

The wrong answers are always other books, people or terms of the same kind, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Many questions carry a picture. Where the answer is one of several novels by a single writer, that writer's portrait appears, since it fits every option equally and cannot point to one; elsewhere a neutral object, old books, a library, a quill, a typewriter, sits behind the question without giving anything away. The title the Classic Novels quiz used for the strange case of a London doctor with two natures is not repeated here. Plots, dates and attributions have been checked against standard reference works.