Book Review: The Westing Game

Title: The Westing Game

Author: Ellen Raskin

Date: 1978

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-41281-1

Length: 216 pages

Quote: “I, Samuel W. Westing, hereby swear that I did not die by natural causes. My life was taken from me—by one of you!”

Samuel W. Westing of Westing Paper Products was about as eccentric as a millionnaire could be, but how could he possibly have known that, and written it into his will? If you keep thinking about that question, you may solve this wacky mystery before any of the sixteen heirs does.

When Westing addresses the sixteen heirs as “my nieces and nephews” he is, of course, stretching the meaning of the phrase, as I use “The Nephews” to include both nephews and nieces, related both by blood and by friendship. The heirs include families with mother, father, and children. But all the residents of Westing Towers were personally invited to move in by Westing, and the interesting part of the story is finding out how all these ethnically diverse, distinctly characterized people are related to him, and thus to one another—though one of them’s being invited was a mistake. If it makes for an unlikely story in the context of a murder mystery, it is an interesting reflection on an aspect of urban life that’s not changed since 1978. Humans are meant to live in extended families; breaking out of our original extended families and isolating ourselves in the cities merely makes the social networks that replace our original families more surprising.

Westing’s will directs his lawyer to lead the sixteen heirs through an elaborate puzzle-solving game. “What they don’t have is more important than what they have”—each character starts with an odd selection of words that, when put together, form a song lyric. Readers will wonder how it was possible for anyone to plan so presciently a game that would be played after his death. That’s another clue.

After writing a pile of picture books Ellen Raskin wrote four mystery novels for sophisticated middle school to young adult readers. My loyalty will forever be to The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon I Mean Noel, the one I read while it was a brand-new book, in grade three. I think The Westing Game was a lesser work produced near the end of the author’s life, but publishers thought the four books were good enough to bring out as a matched set of hardcover volumes with wonderfully wacky illustrations. Possibly the reason why I was less keen on the other three had something to do with my finding the set when I was fifteen, really a bit old for them.

What Raskin did right was give child readers a mixed and balanced set of girl protagonists, no two alike, not an idealized self-two-years-older and not a teen romance in the lot. In the other books Caroline Carillon was fat, gave up, and relied on her adopted children to solve her mystery; Mona Figg was whiny; Dickory Dock was smart and talented, but not nearly as much so as she thought. Turtle Wexler, in this book, is a twelve-year-old shin-kicking brat. Each book gave some hope that each character’s adventures had improved her, by the end.

If you like one of Raskin’s mysteries you’ll probably like all four, and though this one’s not my favorite it might well be yours.

And here’s a tip for mothers wondering whether they want to buy murder mysteries for middle school readers: I, the writer known as Priscilla King, hereby kill the photographer known as Gena Greene. I do that by admitting that Gena Greene, Lady Greensleeves, was the name of a different business I had before Priscilla King became more profitable. For a long time they were two different business entities; since Gena Greene’s 35mm camera was made obsolete and I never got a good digital camera, the only frugal way to bring that business into the Internet Age has been, well, to admit that Gena Greene is me with a different work hat on. That’s not the solution to The Westing Game but it’s a clue to one way it’s possible to write murder mysteries that aren’t too heavy for middle school readers.