Hard Boiled Quiz, Hard Questions!
Know your Sam Spade from your Mike Hammer, test your knowledge of the Hard Boiled Detective Genre with our fun Hard Boiled Quiz!
Hard-boiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. Derived from the romantic tradition which emphasized the emotions of apprehension, awe, horror and terror, hardboiled fiction deviates from that tradition in the detective’s cynical attitude towards those emotions. The attitude is conveyed through the detectives inner monologue describing to the audience what he is doing and feeling.
The genre’s typical protagonist is a detective, who witnesses daily the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition, while dealing with a legal system that had become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are classic antiheroes.
The Hard Boiled Detective Book Quiz
Results
#1. Who wrote the 1930 classic The Maltese Falcon?
Unlucky! Dashiell Hammett wrote the book
#2. Raymond Chandler wrote a series of novels featuring which famous detective?
Unlucky! Philip Marlowe was Chandler’s famous detective creation
#3. Mikey Spillane’s creation Mike Hammer operated in which city?
Unlucky! Mike Hammer was based in New York
#4. Paul Newman starred as Lew Archer in Harper, the film adaption of The Moving Target. Who wrote it?
Unlucky! Ross McDonald wrote the Lew Archer series of novels
#5. Which island featured in Dennis Lehane’s chilling 2001 book?
Unlucky! Shutter Island was Lehane’s Book
#6. The Big Sleep refers to which gangster euphism?
Unlucky! The Big Sleep means death
#7. In Jim Thompson’s famous book, what was the population of Pottsville, Texas?
Unlucky! The title of this famous book is Pop 1280
#8. Complete the title of James M Cain’s classic, Double …….?
Unlucky! Double Indemnity was the title of the famous book
#9. Sam Spade appears in how many full length novels?
Unlucky! The Maltese Falcon was the only full length novel featuring Sam Spade, however the character does appear in a few other short stories by Dashiell Hammett
#10. The Hard-Boiled style was pioneered in the 1920’s by?
Unlucky! The False Burton Combs by Carroll John Daly, published in Black Mask magazine in December 1922 is credited as the first example of the Hard Boiled Genre
Here is a selection of books from authors featured in the quiz
For further reading check out this nice breakdown on Hardboiled Detective Fiction
