#the westing game

I can’t remember when I first read The Westing Game. We had a copy in our car when I was a kid, along with a copy of Fantastic Mr. Fox and probably a few other books I can’t remember. But those two in particular my sister and I quite literally read to pieces. I don’t remember which edition I had, though. I did an image search just now and there were three or so that it might have been.

This one?  
This one? 
This one, maybe? 

I think it’s the first one, but I really don’t remember, which is maybe odd considering I read that book—or part of it—basically every month for a period of years.

My family used to love to take road trips. On any halfway-decent weekend day, my parents would pack us all in the minivan and we’d head out into the wilds of Maryland. There was a TV and VCR in the van and sometimes we’d watch movies or shows, but often we—or at least my sister and I, who were the oldest—would read. We’d half-watch the world pass out the windows in between chapters as we drove from flea markets to antique shops to interesting beaches where we’d wait for ferries to Eastern Shore fishing villages where my parents knew you could get good crabcakes.

I read The Westing Game constantly on these drives, leaving it in the car to pick up again the following weekend on the next drive. I read it over and over, to the point where when I read it now, I half expect to look up from the page and see the road to Solomon’s Island rushing past out the window of our old minivan. These memories even have their own soundtrack, which is mostly the soundtrack from The Muppet Movie interspersed with musical numbers from Newsies and the All New Mickey Mouse Club circa about 1990, plus or minus a couple years. The Westing Game was also one of the first ten or so books I read to my son after he was born, when he would still lie quietly and let me read him anything I wanted. (Curse you for having opinions now, kid. I can only read Maybelle the Cable Car so many times before it goes mysteriously missing.)

The copy I read him—the one I read a couple times a year for much of my adult life—is the Puffin Modern Classics edition, the one with the note from Ellen Raskin’s editor, Ann Durrell. I read it out of nostalgia and love for the story, but also because it’s come to mean something more to me now than it did twenty-odd years ago.

Ms. Durrell says in her editor’s note that Ellen Raskin made The Westing Game up as she went along. This was a revelation to me—that anyone could craft so intricate a story, so insoluble a puzzle, on the fly. I commented on this once, several years ago, on Twitter, and a number of people spoke up and argued that this was probably an
apocryphal anecdote. But I believe her editor, especially since I’ve also listened to the audio recording that’s part of the Raskin archive at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, where Ellen Raskin herself confirms it. Right around the 17:45 mark, she says that she doesn’t outline—that working from an outline would make the process “too boring,” and that she doesn’t know what’s going to happen and doesn’t know the answer before she comes to it. “It’s just deadly,” she says. “You have to give your characters the freedom to tell you what’s going to happen next.” Ann Durrell, who had also edited her earlier books, asked her to submit 50 pages of Raskin’s new story, and based on that, she got her contract for The Westing Game. This isn’t to say that she didn’t research (she did, a lot) or that she didn’t revise (she did, also a lot). There’s a treasure trove of information, drafts and notes at the website of the CCBC, and if you click through, you can follow the progress of the book from those first pages to finished manuscript. A lot of work went into it—it was two years before Ellen Raskin would finish the book she’d sold based on those initial fifty chapters.

To me, that process is utterly beautiful; especially the faith that Raskin had in her stories, her characters, and herself, and the faith her editor had in them, too. At times when I need help believing in my ability to make a story come together, I crack open The Westing Game. I also hate to outline, and though I may never write so elegant a puzzle, I take comfort in knowing that one of the most important books of my childhood was written exactly the way I like to work, and that it was neither an easy nor a quick process.

Other times I crack The Westing Game open because I know when I do, I’ll feel late-spring sun on my face, filtered through the tinted window of a Chevy Astro. I’ll hear the babble of two parents, two brothers, my sister, maybe even my best friend Alli, and somewhere under all the voices, the sweet, sweet stylings of Tony Lucca singing “Take Time.” But only for a minute, because after about a page I’m swept back to Wisconsin, pedaling alongside Turtle Wexler, both of us with braids like kite-tails flying behind us as we rush to tell everyone in Sunset Towers that there’s smoke coming from the chimney of the Westing House. Strange!

Kate Milford is a bookseller at McNally Jackson Books and the author of several novels for young readers. Her most recent book, Greenglass House, was nominated for an Edgar Award, a Nebula Award, and The National Book Award. She’s the real deal.