Raskin created notable mystery
‘Westing Game’ all-American classic
Milwaukee native Ellen Raskin (1928-’84) became a novelist from the outside in.
She started in publishing as a book cover designer and illustrator, including the original cover illustration for Madeleine L’Engle’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time” (1963). Then Raskin created children’s picture books. Later in her life, she turned to novels for young readers, culminating in “The Westing Game,” which won the Newbery Medal in 1979 for the year’s best children’s book.
Ostensibly a novel for children, “The Westing Game” has acquired a strong following among adult readers, caught up in this story of 16 characters deciphering clues in a competition to inherit a rich man’s fortune. In a 2014 New York Times interview, actor Neil Patrick Harris confessed to being “a bit obsessed” with the novel and expressed his desire to “direct a really dark, moody version of it.”
Gillian Flynn, author of the bestseller “Gone Girl,” wrote in a recent essay that she rereads “The Westing Game” once a year. “It sucked me in when I read it for the first time as a kid, and it has influenced all my novels in some small way,” Flynn wrote.
Raskin’s most enduring book honors her connection to Wisconsin with a setting based on Sheboygan, her father’s hometown.
The lyrics of “America the Beautiful” are threaded through this puzzle-mystery (as Raskin called it), reflecting the bicentennial year of 1976, when she began writing the novel. It can also be called an all-American novel for the bristling ethnic and racial diversity of its cast of 16 principals and for their competitive quest to become a millionaire. The first name of Samuel G. Westing, whose will and machinations set the other characters in motion, is no accident. He has staged big Fourth of July celebrations and dressed up as Uncle Sam.
Raskin also tapped fervent public interest in the handwritten will attributed to Howard Hughes after that reclusive millionaire’s death in 1976. Westing owes a little to Hughes and a little to Herbert V. Kohler (1891-1968), former leader of Kohler Co.
The mysterious industrialist
Westing, who had not been seen around Lake Michigan for years, is found dead in bed in his mansion. Sixteen locals receive invitations from Westing’s lawyer to hear the reading of this notorious game-player’s will. It charges them with the mission of discovering which one of them caused his death; the person who can solve that mystery will inherit Westing’s fortune.
Westing was a skilled chess player, which shows in the instructions relayed by his lawyer. The potential heirs are divided into eight unlikely pairs, such as the snobbish Grace Windsor Wexler and restaurateur James Shin Hoo, still bitter because he believes Westing cheated him on the invention of disposable paper diapers years ago.
First among equals, narratively speaking, is 13-year-old Tabitha Ruth Wexler, whom everyone calls Turtle. (Her brilliance in playing the stock market identifies her as a stand-in for the author, who did the same.) When not belittling her feisty younger daughter Turtle, Grace neglects her to dote on 20-year-old Angela, a pretty, gentle woman who wants to be a doctor but is being pushed by her mother into marrying a physician instead. Surprisingly, their mother’s favoritism does not create a rift between the sisters; one takes a big risk to protect the other.
Using the word clues
that Westing provided them, and whatever else they can dig up, the potential heirs separately and together labor to solve this fiendish puzzle. “Out of respect for plodding, rereading readers who never miss a clue,” Raskin wrote in her Newbery acceptance speech, “if the murderer limps, I must make most of my characters, at one time or another, limp.”
Secretly, contestant Judge Josie-Jo Ford pursues a counterquest. Believing Westing is trying to frame one of the heirs for murder, she tries to solve the puzzle to protect that person. An African-American woman, Judge Ford grew up in Westing’s home as the daughter of a servant. He played chess with her and funded her education. But in spite of her success, she resents the help she received from him.
A sense of compassion
It’s easy to see why thriller writer Gillian Flynn returns to “The Westing Game”: Raskin’s red herrings and plot surprises make this a memorable book. But its virtues exceed the mystery per se. Westing is also a kind of Prospero, working a few final acts of magic before he departs. While pitting the would-be heirs against one another, his competition also leads to a better life for the contestants, often through their involvement with their assigned partner. For example, the neglected Turtle and the maternal dressmaker Flora Baumbach, whose own child died years ago, fill emotional needs for each other. Bigoted Grace finds new purpose as the hostess for Shin Hoo’s Restaurant.
Perhaps influenced by her own struggle with chronic illness, Raskin portrays Chris Theodorakis, a 15-year-old boy with a disability that keeps him homebound, with a depth of empathy and insight. Other characters dismiss him because of his difficulty communicating, but Chris, an avid birdwatcher, is also a close observer of people. Dining with an awkward middle-aged woman, Chris sizes her up as a good person who thinks too much about herself: “Maybe she never had anybody to love.” Later, preparing for a visit to the hospital, he thinks poignantly, “How could he explain that what he wanted from his partner was companionship, not more probing, pricking doctors with their bad news that made his mother cry?”
In her 1978 article “Characters and Other Clues,” Raskin writes that she met “the boy I call Chris” three times, first as a 10-year-old with a hint of awkward and finally as a 15-year-old “knotted by spasms, in a wheelchair.” It took three tries to find a restaurant in New York that would let the boy dine with Raskin and her husband. “He was smiling the same smile that he smiles in my book, but in that happier place he has found love and hope and his share of fame. That’s how I want it to be. I like happy endings.”
Her happy ending included winning the Newbery Medal for best children’s book in 1979. In her acceptance speech, Raskin said her readers of varying ages had something in common: “They are young enough or curious enough to read slowly, and the slower the better for my books.”
In 2012, a School Library Journal poll of top children’s novels ranked “The Westing Game” ninth, nestled between “Anne of Green Gables” and “Bridge to Terabithia.” A movie adaptation, which diverges significantly from Raskin’s novel, was released as “Get a Clue” in 1997.