Mystery and Intrigue Theme Analysis

The Westing Game is a mystery novel—as such, the book contains numerous twists and turns, plentiful red herrings (clues intentionally designed to be misleading or distracting), sleights of hand, and seemingly random or useless clues which lead to an unexpected (and even profound) conclusion. By employing a classic murder-mystery structure, Ellen Raskin uses a plot full of intrigue to show how the individuals involved in the Westing game—and, by proxy, all individuals—are just as deep, unknowable, and complex as the complex trial at the heart of the novel. The most compelling mysteries, Raskin argues, are not related to scandal, intrigue, or crime, but to uncovering the truth of another person’s existence.

Just as the work of solving a murder—like that of the wealthy Sam Westing—requires a combination of openness and suspicion as well as instinct and logic, understanding another person requires looking beyond the simple facts of their life and seeking to understand their histories, motivations, and imperfections. Thus, Raskin uses her main characters’ engagement in the titular Westing game—in which they must compete to solve Westing’s murder and win his inheritance money—to compare the complexity of a murder mystery to the complexity of the human spirit. Raskin concludes the first chapter of the novel with the following passage: “Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake.” With this, she frames the disparate people she’s introduced as complex, mysterious, and even threatening—the secrets they possess in spite of their fronts as “mothers and fathers and children” are deep and fraught. Raskin unspools these secrets, revealing by the end of the novel who the bomber, the burglar, the bookie, and the mistake are—but by the time the narrative comes to a close, she’s also shown her readers that none of her characters can be defined by one simple thing. The “bomber” is Angela Wexler, who begins setting off fireworks in hopes of disfiguring herself so that the people who have told her all her life she’ll never amount to anything other than a beautiful wife will be forced to look beyond her face and discover who she truly is. The “burglar” is Madame Hoo, a young immigrant from Hong Kong who is unable to communicate with her new neighbors. Isolated and afraid, she resorts to stealing the possessions of others in order to understand her new neighbors and feel closer to them. The “bookie” is Jake Wexler, who feels unsatisfied by his lackluster profession and yearns for a way to prove himself to his critical, social-climbing wife. The “mistake” is Sydelle Pulaski, who was summoned to live in Sunset Towers along with the other heirs when she was confused with her sister Sybil—and though she is involved in the Westing game by accident, she proves one of its most deft, curious, and insightful players. In unseating her readers’ expectations of these reductive terms and easy categories, Raskin shows how the journey of uncovering who another person truly is can be just as exciting, complicated, and indeed frightful as solving a murder mystery. Once readers learn who the bomber is and who the bookie is, those categories become insufficient to hold all the complicated, disparate parts of each characters’ journey.

Just as following a promising clue often leads one to realize that one has only encountered a red herring, Raskin demonstrates how looking only at the surface of a person’s life in order to understand them often leads to a frustrating dead end. Raskin exemplifies this idea most profoundly through the use of the character dossiers which Judge Ford compiles with the help of her partner in the game, Sandy McSouthers, and a private investigator. Believing that she can get a leg-up on the competition—and quickly determine who the murderer is—by hiring someone to compile hard facts about their neighbors and fellow players, Ford spends hours completing files on each heir. Yet in the end, she comes to realize that these facts reveal nothing. Ford ultimately learns that her partner, Sandy, is Sam Westing in disguise. Once Ford comes to this realization, she begins to see all her research and her dossier compilations as useless. If Westing—her former mentor—could hide from her in plain sight, she begins to wonder what else her fellow heirs could be concealing even as they present themselves, seemingly openly and authentically, to the world. Ford’s journey throughout the novel, from a woman convinced of the power of facts to a woman who understands the unknowability of the human spirit, cements the link between mystery, intrigue, and the impenetrability of individual human experience.

In a novel filled with eccentric individuals, Raskin uses the device of a murder mystery to force her characters—and her readers—to see how complex and multifaceted human beings can be. The almost comically anticlimactic ending of the Westing game, in which even the winner doesn’t truly “win” the inheritance, demonstrates that the game was never about solving a murder or earning an inheritance—it was always about encouraging a diverse and unlikely group of individuals to see the brilliant, unique humanity in one another.