Crime, Mystery & Thriller Fiction Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the kind of suspense novel built around a criminal or civil case, moving through investigation, disclosure of evidence, jury selection and cross-examination toward a verdict, and usually narrated by a lawyer?

Question 2

What is the name for the wave of Scandinavian crime fiction, typically written in plain, unadorned prose, featuring gloomy, worn-down detectives, bleak winter landscapes, and plots that expose the failings behind a prosperous welfare state?

Question 3

Which 1953 novel, the most personal and melancholy of its series, is built on the detective's stubborn loyalty to a charming, weak drunk named Terry Lennox, whom he helps flee to Mexico after Lennox's rich wife is beaten to death?

Question 4

Which fictional detective, a heavy, pipe-smoking commissioner of the Paris crime squad, solves cases less by deduction than by planting himself in a bar or a lodging house, ordering beer and sandwiches, and soaking up the atmosphere and the people until the truth surfaces?

Question 5

Which 1893 short story was written to kill off a detective his author had grown to resent, sending him and his greatest enemy, a mathematics professor he calls the Napoleon of crime, over a waterfall in Switzerland locked together?

Question 6

Which fictional detective, a grumpy, solitary chief inspector based in Oxford, loves Wagner, cryptic crosswords, real ale and his classic Jaguar, and depends on the patient legwork of his working-class sergeant, Lewis?

Question 7

Which 1971 thriller cross-cuts between a cold, nameless English contract killer hired by a French paramilitary group to assassinate President de Gaulle, and the detective quietly assigned to stop him before anyone admits there is a plot?

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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.