Mystery Trivia
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98 free Mystery trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This mystery trivia quiz covers the whodunit in all its forms: the first detective story (Poe's Dupin in 1841), Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie's Poirot and Marple and The Mousetrap, the Golden Age Detection Club, the hardboiled school of Hammett and Chandler, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Perry Mason, Nero Wolfe, Maigret and Morse, modern bestsellers like Gone Girl, The Da Vinci Code, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Thursday Murder Club, and screen sleuths from Columbo and Scooby-Doo to Sherlock, Broadchurch and Only Murders in the Building. There is a Cluedo question too. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who reads crime novels or watches detective television, a third are medium, and the rest will test people who know their locked-room mysteries from their cozies. Good for a book-club night, a library quiz or a murder-mystery party warm-up. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1841 story is considered the first modern detective story?
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841, is the 'tale of ratiocination' in which the killer turns out to be an escaped orangutan.
Q 02What is the name of the Parisian amateur detective in 'The Purloined Letter', an ancestor of Sherlock Holmes?
C. Auguste Dupin
C. Auguste Dupin appears in only three stories, beginning in 1841, and like Holmes later seems able to read his companion's mind.
Q 03What is Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel about a stolen Indian diamond, an early template for the detective novel?
The Moonstone
The Moonstone's hero, Franklin Blake, turns out to have taken the diamond himself, unknowingly, after a doctor secretly dosed him with laudanum.
Q 04In which 1887 novel did Sherlock Holmes first appear?
A Study in Scarlet
A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887, and Conan Doyle had sold all rights to it for just £25.
Q 05Which Sherlock Holmes short story introduces Irene Adler, the woman who outwits the detective?
A Scandal in Bohemia
A Scandal in Bohemia ends with Adler outwitting Holmes and fleeing with the King of Bohemia's photograph; ever after, Holmes calls her simply 'the woman'.
Q 06The Hound of the Baskervilles is set largely on which English moor?
Dartmoor
Dartmoor in Devon is the setting; Conan Doyle had killed Holmes off in 1893, so this 1901 serial brought him back by setting the case before his death.
Q 07Which novel, Agatha Christie's first, introduced her detective Hercule Poirot?
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Mysterious Affair at Styles began as a dare from Christie's sister Madge, and its poisoning drew on Christie's wartime work in a hospital dispensary.
Q 08Hercule Poirot, Christie's Belgian detective, credits his success to what?
His little grey cells
His little grey cells served Poirot to the last: when Curtain killed him off in 1975, The New York Times gave him a front-page obituary.
Q 09In which fictional English village does Miss Marple live?
St Mary Mead
Miss Marple lives in St Mary Mead, the village whose gossip and small crimes she reads as parallels to murder; her first novel was The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.
Q 10Which Christie novel, set on an island off Devon, is the world's best-selling mystery novel?
And Then There Were None
And Then There Were None has sold over 100 million copies; ten strangers lured to the island are killed one by one, each death matching a verse of a nursery rhyme.
Q 11Under what title was Poirot's snowbound-train novel first published in the US in 1934?
Murder in the Calais Coach
Murder in the Calais Coach was the US title because Graham Greene's Stamboul Train had already come out there as Orient Express.
Q 12Which Agatha Christie play holds the record for the longest run of any play in the world?
The Mousetrap
The Mousetrap began as Three Blind Mice, a 1947 radio play Christie wrote for Queen Mary, and was renamed because a West End play already had that title.
Q 13Which actor, later a film director and life peer, was the original Detective Sergeant Trotter in Christie's 1952 play?
Richard Attenborough
Q 21Dashiell Hammett created Sam Spade and which married sleuthing couple from The Thin Man?
Nick and Nora Charles
Nick and Nora Charles star in The Thin Man, whose title really means the missing inventor Clyde Wynant, yet all five film sequels kept 'Thin Man' in their titles.
Q 22Nancy Drew books are published under which collective pseudonym?
Carolyn Keene
Carolyn Keene was a house name: Mildred Wirt Benson ghostwrote most early Nancy Drew books, and her 1980 court testimony revealed her authorship to the public.
Q 23Frank and Joe, sons of detective Fenton, solve crimes in which long-running children's book series?
The Hardy Boys
Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim took a 10% share of the play's profits, which he later sold off, partly to keep Gandhi afloat.
Q 14Who played Poirot in all 70 episodes of ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot from 1989 to 2013?
David Suchet
David Suchet prepared for the role by reading Christie's Poirot novels and stories and noting down the detective's characteristics and habits.
Q 15Who wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey novels and the initiation oath of the Detection Club?
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey in Whose Body? (1923) and introduced Harriet Vane in Strong Poison (1930); Harriet refuses Wimsey's proposals until Gaudy Night (1935).
Q 16Who was the first president of the Detection Club, founded in 1930?
G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton, creator of Father Brown, served as the Detection Club's first president from its founding in 1930 until his death in 1936.
Q 17Christie, Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh are collectively known as what?
The Queens of Crime
The Queens of Crime included Christie, whose 1926 disappearance set off a search by over 1,000 police and 15,000 volunteers until she was found at a Harrogate hotel.
Q 18The priest-detective Father Brown was loosely based on whom?
A real Bradford parish cleric
A real Bradford parish cleric, Father John O'Connor, was the model for Father Brown, and in 1922 he received the author into the Catholic Church.
Q 19Which pulp magazine first published Hammett's Sam Spade and Chandler's early stories?
Black Mask
Black Mask was launched in 1920 by the critics H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to bankroll their literary magazine, The Smart Set.
Q 20Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe first appeared under that name in which 1939 novel?
The Big Sleep
The Big Sleep, whose title is a euphemism for death, introduced Marlowe in 1939; Chandler turned to crime writing at 44 after losing his oil-company job.
The Hardy Boys' first 38 books were rewritten from 1959 to modernise the text and remove racial stereotypes that parents had complained about.
Q 24Boy detective Leroy Brown is better known by what nickname?
Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia Brown's cases stop before the solution, so readers can crack each one themselves and check the answers at the back of the book.
Q 25Which actor played Erle Stanley Gardner's lawyer Perry Mason in the CBS series that ran from 1957 to 1966?
Raymond Burr
Raymond Burr first read for the prosecutor Hamilton Burger, but was told he was perfect for Mason if he slimmed down, so he crash-dieted for a month and won the lead.
Q 26What does Rex Stout's armchair detective Nero Wolfe tend in his New York brownstone?
Orchids
Orchids get Nero Wolfe's fixed hours, 9 to 11 each morning and 4 to 6 each afternoon, and clients must fit around that schedule.
Q 27Ellery Queen was both a detective and the pseudonym of which two cousins?
Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee
Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee won a 1928 mystery-novel contest, but the sponsor folded before paying; a publisher printed their entry, The Roman Hat Mystery, anyway.
Q 28Which accessory is Georges Simenon's detective Commissaire Maigret famous for?
A pipe
A pipe is Maigret's trademark, and Simenon began one of the first novels featuring him in Delfzijl while his boat was repaired; a Maigret statue went up there in 1966.
Q 29Which Umberto Eco novel follows the friar William of Baskerville as he investigates deaths in a medieval abbey?
The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose's William of Baskerville nods to Sherlock Holmes, and the killer poisons a book's pages, knowing monks lick their fingers to turn them.
Q 30What is the name of Sherlock Holmes's landlady at 221B Baker Street?
Mrs Hudson
Mrs Hudson is the long-suffering landlady of 221B Baker Street, enduring Holmes's indoor pistol practice and chemical experiments while bringing up breakfasts and clients.