The Westing Game

BE CLASSIC
HEIDI
JANE EYRE
LITTLE WOMEN
PINOCCHIO
THE WESTING GAME
THE WIZARD OF OZ
WUTHERING HEIGHTS


LET THE GAME BEGIN
FIRST • I returned to live among my friends and my enemies. I came home to seek my heir, aware that in doing so I faced death. And so I did.
Today I have gathered together my nearest and dearest, my sixteen nieces and nephews (Sit down, Grace Windsor Wexler!) to view the body of your Uncle Sam for the last time.
Tomorrow its ashes will be scattered to the four winds.
SECOND • I, Samuel W. Westing, hereby swear that I did not die of natural causes. My life was taken from me—by one of you!


For Jenny
who asked for a puzzle-mystery
and Susan K.


PUFFIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton,
a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc., 1978
This edition, with an introduction by Mac Barnett, published by Puffin Books,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020
Copyright © 1978 by Ellen Raskin
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Mac Barnett
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
Ebook ISBN 9780593204504
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Introduction by MAC BARNETT
First sentences are overrated. Today I sing of second sentences, because the book you are holding right now, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, contains one of the all-time-great second sentences in children’s literature (which by the way necessarily means it contains one of the all-time-great second sentences in any kind of literature), a second sentence you might as well flip ahead and read right now; only please make sure you read the first sentence first, because the slow curvy loft of Sentence One makes the loud sharp pop of Sentence Two explode like a firework—BANG!—that’s left my ears ringing ever since I first read it, way back in grade school, when I picked up the last of Ellen Raskin’s four novels, or, as she called them, “long books” (which speaks not only to Raskin’s respect for the sophistication of picture books, which she wrote and illustrated, but also the visual nature of Raskin’s prose, in which you learn about characters mainly by watching what they do (just like in life!)), a long (but not too long) book called The Westing Game, from a shelf in my classroom simply because I liked its cover (the original jacket, with a house made of $1,000 bills (!), was designed by Raskin herself, who, before she wrote her own books, designed more than 1,000 jackets for other people’s, and who supervised the design of The Westing Game, choosing the fonts, placing all those dots, and setting nice wide inviting margins, because she wanted her “children’s book to look like a wonderful place to be,” an idea that was so important to her that when the bookbinder trimmed the pages of The Westing Game’s first printing a quarter inch too close (about the width of two letter m’s next to each other, like this: mm), she insisted all 15,000 copies be pulped—destroyed, never sold—because she thought the book looked “tight and heavy and cheap”), and when I cracked it open on a cloudless afternoon, I have to tell you that The Westing Game absolutely knocked me out, and not just because it contained a puzzle I tried desperately to solve, and failed (Raskin described her book as “an almost insoluble mystery, unless you know what to look for, and once you find it out, at the very last page, and if you go and read it again, everything is there, I mean it is so simple, from the first paragraph on you’ve got all the clues”—a first paragraph, by the way, that’s just two sentences long), and not just because it was full of morally complicated characters, mostly adults (the book’s original title was Eight Imperfect Pairs of Heirs), but mainly because the way Ellen Raskin wrote a sentence made her interesting to me, made me want to listen to her (and in that way, reading The Westing Game was a lot like another miracle of childhood: being seated next to an adult at a dinner party who actually talked to you like you were a thinking person—which reminds me of another thing Ellen Raskin said, that her books were complicated, “but not as complicated to children as they are to adults,” which I love, but love even more that after she said it, a room full of adults laughed, and she got annoyed with them), because the truth is that nobody wrote sentences like Ellen Raskin, and the reason I remember reading The Westing Game’s second sentence so well is that it was the first time I became aware of an author’s style, a quality of writing that’s almost impossible to define and can only be really understood by reading the work of stylish writers, writers like Ellen Raskin, who made sentences do things I didn’t know they could do (and in fact the second sentence of The Westing Game was one my teacher would never have allowed me to write, because sentences are supposed to have