Treasure of the Golden Skull

Chris Priestley's Treasure of the Golden Skull is a very silly school mystery for 9 year olds about pirate treasure and a school that's about to be shut down.

What happens

Mildew and Sponge go to Maudlin Towers, a gloomy old school on the moors where bits keep falling off the building. When a stone pinnacle crashes through the Headmaster's ceiling, he bursts into tears and admits Maudlin Towers could be shut for good. The governors want to strip it and start again somewhere else. And the money for the repairs has gone missing (don't ask).

The boys have never liked the place. But then Mildew realises that if it closes, they'll be sent to different schools. That's unthinkable!

So they go looking for treasure. The Headmaster's office is panelled with the timbers of a pirate ship, the Golden Skull. Its captain, Greenbeard, buried his jewels somewhere nobody has ever found. Then Sponge drops the Headmaster's ship in a bottle, spots a clue on its sail and gets bonked on the head by a falling bit of ceiling. He can't remember a word of it.

Oh, and it turns out Greenbeard was one of Mildew's ancestors. That's a very exciting family secret, right up until the class sneak sells it to the newspapers.

Reading it is like watching a comedy double act. Mildew is pompous and Sponge is a bit dim, except when he suddenly isn't. They bicker about biscuits, about who blubs more and about whether a one-eyed parrot really exists. Who wouldn't want to be in the dorm with those two?

The teachers are gloriously odd. The English teacher gazes out at the moors every lesson, pining for a sheep farmer who left her to become an accountant. The Headmaster can't stop buying shoes. There's a new boy called Newboy (it's a coincidence, he says), and somebody is hypnotising people with a pocket watch. It's a book full of wordplay, puns and grown-ups behaving ridiculously.

What to read next

It's a later Maudlin Towers adventure, and the boys keep mentioning things that happened in the earlier books. So it's well worth starting at the beginning with Curse of the Werewolf Boy, where the teachers threaten to cancel Christmas and a man in a winged helmet goes running along the bottom of the ha-ha.