From Edgar Allan Poe to Enid Blyton and Gillian Flynn, here’s where to find the best treasure troves in literature

Like a good whodunnit, a treasure-hunt story can be the ultimate page-turner (and in a way, all detective novels are treasure hunts too, since the sleuth must solve a series of clues to discover the prize of the murderer’s identity). It delivers thrills, perhaps danger, but often with a sense that things will work out happily in the end. It’s no coincidence that when I remember childhood treasure hunts, they always seem to have taken place on perfectly sunny days. I grew up in the city, but occasionally as a family we spent weekends with friends in rural Aberdeenshire. Those weekends were like stepping into an Enid Blyton book; though our friends’ parents couldn’t provide us with real mysteries to solve or criminals to catch, they could set a mean treasure hunt.

When I started to write The Last Treasure Hunt, I wanted to explore childhood friendships and shared memories using the idea of an annual hunt. And because a treasure hunt is an ever-shifting mix of teamwork and competition, I found it worked as a metaphor for adult friendships too – for that strange brew of loyalty and rivalry that characterises some of the closest friendships. In my book the quest to solve the clues is an attempt to undo a series of bad choices, to make amends – and this seems to be in the tradition of literary treasure hunts; often in the titles I’ve chosen, the discovery of treasure is a means of putting things to rights, whether it’s restoring a family fortune or saving the world from the forces of darkness.

1. The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe

A masterpiece of misdirection, this short story tells the tale of William Legrand’s delirious search for the pirate treasure hidden by notorious real-life Captain Kidd. What seems at first like a tale of the supernatural or a descent into madness is revealed, through Legrand’s step-by-step explanation, as a logical if improbable case of invisible ink, ciphers and cryptic clues. The treasure, meticulously catalogued, includes gold coins, jewellery and precious gemstones, along with 83 crucifixes and 197 gold watches: more than enough to restore Legrand’s lost fortune.

2. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Partially inspired by Poe’s story, the most famous of all treasure hunts began when Stevenson sketched an imaginary island complete with swamps, graves, and an X to mark the spot where the “Bulk of Treasure” was buried. From his sketch, Stevenson conceived the tale of young Jim Hawkins, who finds the map in a dead man’s chest and takes up the role of cabin boy in a search for pirate gold. At the end of the story, a significant part of the treasure is left on the island, and the way is left open for a number of sequels, though none by Stevenson himself. Treasure Island is packed with vivid characters, but it’s Long John Silver who steals the show as a murderous mutineer who nevertheless spares Jim’s life. In a metafictional companion piece, The Persons of the Tale, Stevenson has Silver and his arch-enemy Captain Smollett step out of the story between chapters to smoke a pipe and discuss the intentions of the Author, of whom Silver says: “I’m his favourite chara’ter … he likes doing me.”

3. Five on a Treasure Island by Enid Blyton

In the first of the Famous Five adventures, siblings Julian, Dick and Anne are deemed big enough to look after themselves for the summer and packed off to Kirrin Bay to stay with “difficult” cousin George. The ensuing search for a cargo of gold ingots stashed on Kirrin Island includes enough Gothic elements to thrill young readers: a ruined castle, hidden dungeons and an ancient shipwreck raised by a storm. The adventure is unhindered by interfering parents, who are largely absent or unreliable – Uncle Quentin is “bad-tempered, unjust and not to be trusted” until the sudden acquisition of wealth transforms him into a cheerful, affectionate father – and it’s much-maligned Anne who devises a plan to rescue George and Julian, thus lifting George’s family out of genteel poverty.

4. Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

The first in the Dark Is Rising series that chronicles the battle between the forces of Light and Dark, this family adventure story starts with a hidden door behind which the Drew children discover an ancient document. The document, written in Latin and Early English, points to the existence of a grail and foretells the return of Arthur Pendragon if it is ever brought to light. Cooper is working in darker territory than Blyton, blending Arthurian myth with genuinely unsettling intimations of the evil that she develops more fully in the rest of the series. Her books are deeply embedded in the landscapes and legends of Wales and southern England; here the children must decipher the clues of the Cornish coastline itself – its standing stones and rocky headlands – in their quest to find the grail before it can be claimed by the agents of darkness.

5. Masquerade by Kit Williams

In 1979, this book sparked a national craze for armchair treasure hunting. Jack Hare is tasked to deliver a love token – a jewelled golden hare – from the moon to the sun, but loses it somewhere along the way: the challenge for the reader is to solve the puzzle and find this real-life buried treasure. The clues are intricately worked into a series of 15 detailed illustrations, some of which are red herrings, with colour sequences and magic squares used as keys. The puzzle was solved in 1982, but the hunt ended in controversy when the golden hare was found by the partner of a former girlfriend of Williams.

6. Romanno Bridge by Andrew Greig

A sequel to The Return of John Macnab, which was itself inspired by John Buchan’s John Macnab – “Buchan with bells on”, as one writer put it. But this is no boy’s own adventure: a cast of strong characters is headed up by local reporter Kirsty who finds herself in possession of a ring inscribed with medieval runes. So begins the hunt for the true Stone of Destiny, the Scottish and British coronation stone. On one level, this thriller-romance reads as a Caledonian Da Vinci Code, albeit one written by an award-winning poet – but the deeper quest is for friendship, in a novel that offers a corrective to Buchan’s ideas about patriotism and national identity.

7. PopCo by Scarlett Thomas

Alice Butler is a maths geek who learned code-breaking skills from her cryptographer grandparents. Now employed by global toy company PopCo, where her brands include KidSpy, KidTec and KidCracker – kits for loner children who want to play at being spies, detectives and code-breakers – Alice finds herself spying, detecting and code-breaking for real when she starts to receive mysterious messages. Could the notes be connected to the code she wears around her neck, on a locket given to her by her grandfather – a code that might lead her to pirate treasure, if she can ever crack it? A story of brand identities and secret identities, PopCo is a primer in the history of encryption, a critique of our culture, and a grown-up take on adventure stories with the trope of absent and unreliable parents given a darker, realist twist.

8. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

In a dystopian 2044, young people escape the grimness of everyday life by spending their waking hours in the OASIS, an elaborate virtual reality comprising thousands of worlds. Teenager Wade is one of millions trying to solve the richest-ever treasure hunt by discovering the easter egg concealed somewhere in one of these worlds: the winner will inherit not only the vast fortune accumulated by the creator of OASIS, but the virtual reality itself. Since the clues are based on the creator’s obsessive knowledge of 1980s trivia and gaming culture, this futuristic pursuit is of course also an exercise in nostalgia, packed with pop-cultural references from Space Invaders to John Hughes movies. The novel spawned a real-life treasure hunt, with an easter egg concealed in the paperback, a series of online gaming challenges, and a DeLorean as the grand prize.

9. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

On the surface, the anniversary treasure hunts that Amy sets for husband Nick are a romantic tradition, a celebration of shared memories. In reality, they’re a series of impossible tests: how well does he know his wife? Nowhere near well enough, as it turns out when Amy goes missing on their fifth anniversary – leaving behind a trail of clues that are carefully plotted to draw Nick into a larger, more sinister plot. In a novel of parallel narratives that double back on themselves, Amy’s clues are similarly slippery, loaded with double meanings; shared jokes become secret weapons in this story of love curdling into hate.

10. Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

This bibliophile hunt begins in a secondhand bookshop with wheeled ladders and shelves that stretch up for three storeys. Redundant web designer turned bookshop assistant Clay Jannon discovers his new workplace is central to the existence of a hidden society whose members are dedicated to breaking a seemingly unsolvable 500-year-old cipher. What ensues is a search for a 16th-century treasure using 21st-century techniques: analogue and digital intersect as Clay and his friends deploy data visualisation, crowd-sourcing and book-scanning – and call on Google HQ for help – in their quest for nothing less than the secret of immortality.

Jane Alexander’s novel The Last Treasure Hunt is published by Saraband.

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