Old Gold Trivia Quiz

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe

William Legrand has lost his family fortune, which has forced him to move his residence from New Orleans to settle on Solomon Island in South Carolina. He discovers an ornamental bug that he is convinced is made out of gold, and then uncovers a hidden cryptogram on the parchment in which the bug was wrapped up. He solves the riddle of the code and this creates an obsession to track down what he believes to be the lost treasure of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd.

This short story is a classic piece of misdirection, which was published by Poe in 1843. Initially you are drawn into a tale that appears to be one of the supernatural, before being sidetracked into believing that your protagonist is slipping into madness. Eventually Poe reveals the mystery through a series of cryptic clues and ciphers, carved into the tale in invisible ink.

Answer: Susan Cooper

"The Dark is Rising" is a series of five young adult novels by English author Susan Cooper that pit the Children of Light against the forces of Dark. "Over Sea, Under Stone" (1965) represents the first in that series, though it was originally written as a stand alone story.

This tale centres around the Drew children, who discover an ancient document written, partly, in Latin and in Early English. Their curiosity aroused, they begin to ask questions but, unfortunately, of too many of the wrong people. Whilst they discover that the document is linked to Arthur Pendragon and that it reveals the whereabouts of the Holy Grail, their inquisitiveness has also awakened the agents of the Dark. Suddenly, their lives are in peril as they rush to find the Grail before it falls to the dark side.

Answer: Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson's 1883 tale is, arguably, the most famous treasure hunt in literature. Young Jim Hawkins discovers a map in a dead man's chest, where "X" marks the spot to some buried gold. He informs a local physician and a squire and the trio charter a ship and a crew and head off on an expedition to find this fortune. Unknown to them is that the crew, led by a one-legged cook called Long John Silver, are all pirates who plan to stage a mutiny once the gold is discovered.

Stevenson's tale moves along at a merry pace, and possesses enough twists and vivid characters to keep the reader enthralled. For this reader, though, the character that steals the show is Long John Silver and his characterization by Stevenson - one leg, parrot on the shoulder - created a platform that has been imitated countless times in the pirate genre.

Answer: Matthew Reilly

When picking up a Matthew Reilly novel, one should suspend belief before entering a set pages where the action is going to leave you breathless. "Seven Ancient Wonders" (2005) is the first in a series of seven novels that feature Captain Jack West Jr, a man described as "part soldier, part scholar, all hero".

The story opens with the introduction that the Earth, around 4,500 years ago, was saved from a catastrophic event when the capstone at the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza absorbed the energy from a monstrous sunspot. The capstone was then broken up by Alexander the Great into seven pieces, each one hidden in one of the Ancient Seven Wonders in booby trapped cells. With another solar event about to occur, the race is on to regather these pieces and replace them on the pyramid. Whoever manages to achieve this will earn their nation 1,000 years of peace and power.

Three teams race for the pieces but only one, an "Alliance of Minnows" led by Jack West, is doing so with altruistic notions.

Answer: Enid Blyton

As a child, Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" and "Secret Seven" stories quickly became "must reads" for me. The way these teams were able to find their way into mysteries and danger and find ways to untangle the webs they'd found themselves in were ingenious to my developing imagination.

"Five on a Treasure Island" (1942) is the first of the "Famous Five" tales and, here, the team finds itself spending their holiday in Kirrin Bay with the poverty stricken Uncle Quentin and Aunty Fanny. They also get to meet the difficult cousin Georgina, who prefers to be called George, but becomes someone they will eventually warm to.

In between pages containing ruined castles, hidden dungeons and secret passageways, Blyton uses a storm to raise an ancient shipwreck where the Five find a box with a map to a secret treasure. When Uncle Quentin sells the box to an antique dealer who, suddenly, makes an offer to him to buy the island, the Five know that they are in a race against time to find the treasure.

Answer: Clive Cussler

Cussler introduces us to the premise that, while crossing the Pennine Alps with his army, Napoleon Bonaparte discovered a massive treasure, which he believed to be the spoils of the Persian King, Xerxes the Great, after his raid on the treasury at Delphi. Napoleon, however, had a problem... the treasure was too bulky to carry home. His solution was to draw a map to the treasure and, for safety, he divided it into twelve parts and used these portions to create labels for twelve bottles of rare wine. When Napoleon died... the wines were lost.

Enter Sam and Remi Fargo, two professional treasure hunters, who discover one of the bottles on German U-Boat and, so, begins their quest for the horde. In typical Cussler fashion, nothing is ever easy and, to this end he introduces another quester for the booty. This time it is a Russian multi-millionaire named Hadeon Bondaruk, who claims to be a descendant of Xerxes, wants his family's fortune back and is prepared to kill anybody who stands between he and it.

Published in 2009 and co-written with Grant Blackwood, this is the first novel in a series that features Sam Fargo and his treasure hunting wife Remi.

Answer: H. Rider Haggard

H. Rider Haggard, initially, struggled to find a publisher for this 1885 story but, when it finally did hit the shelves, the demand was so great for the novel that his publisher could not keep up with it. Haggard's story also launched what became known as the "Lost World" genre, a category where characters meet another civilization that sits out of time. Other writers such as Rudyard Kipling ("The Man Who Would be King" - 1888) and Edgar Rice Burroughs ("The Land That Time Forgot" - 1918) soon followed.

In this yarn, noted adventurer and big game hunter Alan Quartermain is recruited to help find an Englishman, lost in the desert while trying to locate King Solomon's Mine. Quartermain agrees, advising that he has an old map to the mine but he'd always doubted its veracity. Along the way they collect another traveler, purporting to be a Zulu, get involved with a civil war among a Zulu tribe and find that the traveler they'd collected is the rightful king of this tribe. They eventually find the mine and fill their pockets with riches and manage to locate the lost Englishman on their return journey.

Answer: Scarlett Thomas

Alice Butler is a geek who is an absolute whiz at mathematics which, in turn, contributes to her skills as an amateur cryptographer. Now, at 29 years of age, she finds herself working for a large toy conglomerate called PopCo, creating spy styled games and puzzles, and producing brands such as KidSpy, KidTec and KidCracker. However, when she starts receiving secret messages things start to "get real" for Alice, as she is required to call upon all of her cipher skills. It is these abilities that are likely to keep her alive and, possibly, lead her to a hidden pirate's treasure.

Scarlett Thomas' 2004 novel has been favorably compared to Neal Stephenson's epic "Cryptonomicon" (1999) and both Time Out magazine and the Independent on Sunday saw fit to name it their Book of the Year in 2004.

Answer: Ernst Cline

In the year 2045 there is very little for the population to enthuse about in the dystopian future that Cline has created. The residents have been hammered by poverty, bound by pollution and suppressed by global warming, overpopulation and the depletion of fossil fuels. Their only escape from this reality is a virtual world called OASIS, a universe that comes complete with its own array of worlds and living zones.

This virtual world was created by James Donovan Halliday who, prior to his passing, indicated that he'd hidden an Easter Egg, containing three keys, within the game. Should anyone find all three keys and use them to open three different doors, they would inherit Donovan's fortune, which included not only his worldly possessions, but also control of the virtual world itself. The whole package is measured in the trillions of dollars.

The novel picks up five years after the death of Donovan and, to this point, not a single key has been found. The likely candidate appears to be an 18 year old boy named Wade Watts. Wade is a grunter (egg hunter) from the "stacks", a downtrodden district that is made up of a series of trailer parks stacked on top of one another. Whilst he makes progress, he is up against a large corporation known as Innovative Online Industries who are seeking to gain control of the virtual world, which they see as a pathway to obscene wealth.

Answer: Gillian Flynn

This 2012 thriller has so many twists and turns! It will leave you scratching your head trying to decipher who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, who will win and who will lose... and to throw a spanner in the works, both parties are unreliable narrators in this novel.

Nick and Amy are happily married... or are they? They have a romantic tradition whereby, every year, on their anniversary Amy sets Nick little treasure hunts, as a way of delving into their shared memories. However, on their fifth anniversary, the treasure that Nick may need to find is Amy, who has disappeared... or has she? Amy has left behind a series of clues that are full of double meanings and shared jokes that are, ultimately, leading Nick into a far more sinister plot. Does Amy get her way or does Nick turn the tables? Happy reading.