1979: THE WESTING GAME by Ellen Raskin
The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!
A note on content: this piece, and the novel, contain a brief reference to suicide.
Like all Newburied pieces, this essay contains significant spoilers for the novel in question. Given the nature of The Westing Game, if you prefer to be surprised by the plot twists/mysteries, you may want to read the book first before starting this essay.
Okay, I think by now you have a handle on how this newsletter works. The overarching structure is pretty rigid: there's a new one every week at the same time, they're usually the same approximate word count, and in terms of subject matter, I'm ticking through a pre-set list of 100 books. None of that could be said about my last newsletter project, where the scheduling, length, format, and subject matter were all wildly inconsistent and the only dependable thing was that I used a lot of swear words.
But it's also pretty obvious with this project that I'm just using each book as an excuse to talk about whatever is interesting to me that I can somehow peripherally relate back to the book. Obvious stuff, like book bans and other ALA awards, or less obvious stuff like Josh Radnor's religion blog or the pretend Wheel Of Time television pilot.
For this entry, though, I really do need to dedicate the bulk of my word count to explaining what actually happens in Ellen Raskin's 1979 medalist The Westing Game.
This is what happens in the central mystery of The Westing Game, in the order that it happens (but not the order the reader finds out). The "Westing" of The Westing Game is Sam Westing (born Sam Windkloppel), a reclusive Wisconsin tycoon who made millions founding a consumer paper products company, basically a stand-in for Kimberly-Clark or SC Johnson. Early in the novel, for reasons I still do not understand, he fakes his death. He has, by the time he fakes his death, already assumed an alter ego, Julian R. Eastman, the businessman who succeeded Westing as CEO of the company.
Let's pause here for a second. Westing faked his death and, this completely baffles me, continued going to work. In the same job that he had before faking his own death. When I fake my own death - which, if I can keep on track with my current timeline, should happen in about three years - the first thing I'm giving up is showing up to work every day. I certainly won’t continue showing up to work at a company that I founded and served as CEO of for decades, when there’s a risk that somebody on the board might notice that, for example, the outgoing CEO and the incoming CEO happen to be exactly the same height and build and have never been seen together ever at any point in time. But nobody at Westing Paper Products, or anyone anywhere at all, seems to put together that these two men, named “Westing” and “Eastman” like opposite cardinal directions, have always been the same man.
After faking his death, Westing assumes two additional identities. The first, realtor Barney Northrup - perhaps you’re seeing a theme with the names here - hustles to rent all of the units of a new lakefront apartment building, Sunset Towers, to sixteen very specific people that he has in mind. For some reason, he wants his specific list of sixteen people to basically all live together in this apartment building. The final identity is Alexander “Sandy” McSouthers, who begins work as a doorman at Sunset Towers, so that Westing can personally keep an eye on the eclectic group of people he has gathered together.
The sixteen people in question are notified that they are named as heirs in the late Sam Westing’s will. Keeping with Westing’s public persona, the will is extremely eccentric, ambiguously worded, and contains all sorts of double meanings and patriotic allusions. But Westing’s will also states that “I did not die of natural causes. My life was taken from me - by one of you!”
This is true, but only in the most literal sense possible. Westing’s “life was taken” by McSouthers, who is one of the sixteen heirs, but really just Westing in disguise. But the remaining heirs interpret it the same way that any normal person would: Westing is claiming that he was murdered, and the will promises his full $200 million estate to whichever one of the heirs can correctly identify his murderer. The heirs are paired off into eight groups, each of which is given a unique set of clues, which are seemingly unconnected words: one set of clues is “WITH THY BEAUTIFUL MAJESTIES” and another is “FOR PLAIN GRAIN SHED”.
The bulk of The Westing Game follows the residents of Sunset Towers after the reading of the will, as they live in close quarters with (they think) a murderer, puzzle out who each other really is, try to trick each other into giving up their clues, and figure out why they were named as heirs in the first place, since all of them have loose connections to Westing but none of them think they are blood relatives. One of the residents starts setting off bombs in the building. One starts stealing from the apartments. Everyone spies and lies and stalks and stakes out, to try and find out if everyone is really who they say they are. Everyone's connections to Westing are slowly revealed: his daughter's childhood sweetheart. The dressmaker for his daughter's wedding. The child of his household servants. His ex-wife's childhood best friend. A former employee fired for trying to unionize a Westing factory. An inventor who sued Westing over stealing a patent idea. Everyone with a potential reason to murder the man, who, again, is not really dead.
As it turns out, all of the clue words are red herrings. The actual criteria for winning the inheritance - perhaps the wrong word, as Westing is not dead - is realizing that there was an ambiguity in the wording of one critical part of the will. The paragraphs of the will are titled with ordinal numbers - FIRST, SECOND, THIRD and so on - and paragraph three ends the following way:
“Who among you is worthy to be the Westing heir? Help me. My soul shall roam restlessly until that one is found. The estate is at the crossroads. The one who wins the windfall will be the one who finds the”
During the reading of the will, Westing - in disguise as Sandy McSouthers - blurts something out to cause a disruption, and afterwards the executor continues with “FOURTH”. The heirs never heard the final word of the paragraph, because there isn’t one. The will, as written, reads: “The one who wins the windfall will be the one who finds the Fourth”, referring to the heir who can correctly identify all of Sam Windkloppel’s four aliases: Sam Westing, Julian Eastman, Barney Northrup, and Sandy McSouthers. That is the actual “Westing Game” that determines who gets the $200 million at the end. The book is 217 pages long and this linguistic trick is revealed on page 201. I don’t think that the average reader would piece this together on their first read.
The average reader, of course, would be focused on the clues and the fake mystery that everyone is trying to solve in the first 200 pages of the novel. The clues are red herrings, but they do point somewhere: in a climactic scene, the heirs finally pool their clues together and realize that they rearrange to form the lyrics of “America The Beautiful”, with a few key syllables missing. The missing syllables spell out the name of one of the heirs, the person that Westing meant to accuse of his own murder which never happened.
I’m at 1,200 words in this essay so far.
Who was Westing trying to accuse of his own murder and thus ruin their life? His ex-wife. As we learn from one of the heirs’ research into Westing’s history, Westing had always blamed his wife for their daughter’s suicide and, apparently, devised the most elaborate revenge scheme imaginable, one involving three long-term disguises, having the county coroner on the take, multiple real estate transactions involving new construction, and still showing up to work every day as the CEO of a major consumer packaged goods company but just doing it in disguise now.
But also, maybe this isn't a revenge scheme? Because he also gives $20,000 to his ex-wife by the end of his weird revenge game, and also rewards the rest of his heirs in unique ways. The inventor who thought Westing stole his idea for a patent gets a new idea for a new invention from Westing in disguise. Another heir who owes her law school education to Westing gets an opportunity to repay her debt. Another heir who is afflicted with a cerebral palsy-like condition is connected with a doctor who can get him a new experimental treatment. Westing, ultimately, uses the game to make amends with the people he has wronged in his past, and eventually rewards one of them with the full $200 million dollars. And also his ex-wife spends one night in prison, I guess, just so Westing can have a quick laugh before taking care of her.
All of these, of course, are actions that Westing could do as an alive person. It is never really clear why Westing had to "die" in order to do this, especially considering that he didn't abandon any of his personal or professional responsibilities by faking his own death; if anything, his life became far more complex with the assumption of his additional fake lives. The ultimate effect of the Westing game - again, a game which was fake and just a distraction from the actual criteria for taking the $200 million grand prize - seems to be positive for most of the heirs, but the motivation behind setting up the game in the first place doesn't appear to be anything more complex than boredom or possibly cruelty.
Obviously, this is all bizarre and insane. Sam Westing is insane. The entire mystery and structure of the novel is insane. The most insane thing of all is that Raskin basically makes it all work.
The Westing Game was one of my favorite books growing up, and while the actual mystery, on paper, makes no sense at all, I still found the book impossible to dislike - and impossible not to tear through - while revisiting it as an adult. A less talented author could have taken a puzzle this complex and turned it into an dense and dry and unreadable book (basically, that's what Blue Balliet does), but Ellen Raskin has created some truly wonderful and hilarious characters, like Grace Wexler, the scrambling WASPy social climber, or James Hoo, the disgruntled Chinese restaurant owner, or Sydelle Pulaski, the lonely secretary who affects a limp and hobbles around on hand-painted crutches to get attention. Raskin also created one of the funniest characters in children's literature in Tabitha-Ruth "Turtle" Wexler, a bourbon-swilling, shin-kicking, stock-shorting, scheming entrepreneur who also happens to be a 13-year-old girl.
Which brings me to my next point: Raskin has a very strange sense of humor. Every page of The Westing Game is dense with comebacks and zingers, from both the dialogue and the dry wit of the narration, each joke usually shoehorning in one more punchline than you'd expect, calling back to something that happened forty pages earlier, or calling forward to something that won't happen for another ten chapters (Raskin also does this in her other three novels, which are all weird recursive mysteries, and one of which was also a Newbery finalist). This means that, while the characters in The Westing Game make the novel plenty of fun for a first-time reader, the book really demands to be read and re-read multiple times. A reader will finish the book and want to go back through it again to review each beat of the mystery, each paragraph in the will, each double entendre in the dialogue, to see how every apparent throwaway line is tied down tightly in place. Even the first line of the novel - the dry observation in the subheader above - is actually a clue to identifying Westing's alter ego of Eastman. With these characters and these jokes, it's tremendous fun to untie all of these knots, even when they're attached to a frame as absurd as Sam Westing's broken marriage.
So The Westing Game may not be in as many school curricula as something like Johnny Tremain or Bridge To Terabithia, but it absolutely has a dedicated cult following among the kinds of kids whose parents introduced them to cooperative board games too early (myself included). It's easily Raskin's most famous written work1. Gillian Flynn, author of her own recursive mysteries like Gone Girl, is a famous fan, as is Neil Patrick Harris, who tried for years to adapt the novel into a film. My paperback copy from a 1997 printing has a glowing cover blurb by, of all people, hirsute Today Show mainstay Gene Shalit. And after revisiting the book and spending all of those paragraphs making fun of the absurd mystery, I can tell you that I plan to keep holding on to that paperback for a long time.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1948 medalist, The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois.
Although Raskin's most famous work of all might be an illustration, as she designed the cover for the first edition of A Wrinkle In Time.