Quiz: Can You Identify These Last Lines of Classic Mystery and Crime Novels?
How well do you remember these famous final sentences?
Hello chaps! It’s high time we put out another quiz. Why? Because they’re fun, I don’t know.
Like the quizzes that came before it, this one is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have listed many famous opening lines from crime, mystery, and thriller novels. And you have to guess which book each line comes from.
I call these “classic” books. They aren’t all necessarily old, but they are definitely some of the better-known, well-respected books in their genre.
The answer key is way down at the bottom. As you take the quiz, I’d write down your answers next to the corresponding questions’ numbers (on a sheet of paper or in your notes app) and then grade yourself in one swoop when you’re done, so that you’re not constantly scrolling down and up again as you go, thereby risking seeing some of the other answers.
If you can get the author/character but can’t get the name of the exact book, then give yourself half a point.
Obviously, people, this list contains spoilers. I mean, come on!
Here we go!
__________________________________
Questions:
1. “But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”
2. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
3. “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”
4. “‘I wish you all a long and happy life.’”
5. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
6. “Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”
7. “I think this is the best we can hope for right now.”
8. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?”
9. “But that is the story for another time.”
10. “I wish you all good luck.”
11. “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
12. “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”
13. “I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
14. “Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again.”
15. “That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.”
16. “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
17. “I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”
__________________________________
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Answers down below.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Keep scrolling!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Answer Key:
1. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
3. Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”
4. Alice Sebold, The Lucky Bones
5. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
6. Graham Greene, The Quiet American
7. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
8. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
9. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
10. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
11. Cormac McCarthy, The Road
12. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
13. Donna Tartt, The Secret History
14. James Crumley, The Final Country
15. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866; trans. Constance Garnett)
16. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
17. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
