Gangsters in fiction – quiz

Eighty years ago today, Bonnie and Clyde were killed in an ambush in Louisiana – but even in life they were surrounded by myth and legend. Can you separate fact from fiction? Test your outlaw knowhow with our gangster fiction quiz


The making of a legend ... Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Photograph: Allstar

  1. 1. Which novel opens with the line: "Amergo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court No 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonour her"

  2. 2. Subtitled the The Malefactors' Bloody Register, which book of crimes and misdemeanours was among the top three most likely to be found in 18th and 19th century households?

  3. 3. What is the name of the Bill Sikes’s dog in Oliver Twist?

  4. 4. Killing Them Softly, the recent mob film starring Brad Pitt, is based on which George V Higgins novel?

  5. 5. In Billy Bathgate by EL Doctorow, where is Billy sent to keep an eye on Drew?

  6. 6. In Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, who is Pinkie’s second in command?

  7. 7. In the graphic novel A History of Violence by John Wagner and Vince Locke, what is Tom missing?

  8. 8. Bonnie Parker wrote The Story of Bonnie and Clyde and gave it to her mother before her death. Which infamous outlaw does she refer to in the poem’s first line?

  9. 9. What is the name of the gangster at the heart of Javier Cercas's Outlaws?

  10. 10. In Peter Carey’s Booker prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang, for what crime is Ned Kelly arrested and sentenced to three years in prison?

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