Crime, Mystery & Thriller Fiction Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1962 spy novel is narrated by an insubordinate, working-class British agent, unnamed in the book, who is seconded to track down missing scientists and ends up drugged and brainwashed in what he thinks is a cell behind the Iron Curtain?

Question 2

Which 1841 short story, generally counted as the first modern detective tale, has an eccentric, reclusive Parisian gentleman solve a baffling double killing in a top-floor apartment whose windows and doors were all fastened on the inside?

Question 3

Which 1935 novel, unusual for having no murder in it, brings a mystery novelist back to her old Oxford women's college for a reunion, where she is asked to trace the author of a campaign of poison-pen letters, obscene graffiti and vandalism?

Question 4

What is the name, popularised by Alfred Hitchcock, for the thing the characters in a thriller are all pursuing, the secret papers, the stolen formula, the jewelled bird, whose exact nature matters far less than the chase it sets in motion?

Question 5

Which 1981 thriller opens with three corpses found frozen in the snow of a Moscow park, their faces and fingertips cut away to stop identification, and follows the dogged Soviet militia investigator assigned to the case as it tangles with the secret police and a rich American fur dealer?

Question 6

Which short, violent 1934 novel is narrated by a drifter who stops at a roadside diner in California, begins an affair with the owner's bored wife, and joins her in two attempts to kill her older Greek husband, the second one succeeding?

Question 7

What is the name for the kind of crime story in which the reader watches the culprit plan and commit the crime in the opening pages, so that the interest lies entirely in seeing how the investigator will trip them up?

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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.