Shmoop - The Westing Game: A Puzzle Mystery

This title refers to a "game" the characters are playing: find the answer to Sam Westing's will, and win $200 million. But it also refers to another, similar game that only the narrator and one character know about, which we won't spoil in this section. Both of these games are kind of like chess, which is a subject that comes up a lot in the book: there are teams playing for strategy, with pawns, queens, and sacrifices. The Oxford English Dictionary (by the way, this might be the best dictionary to ever use in a lit. paper) tells us that the first, most popular meaning of "game" is "amusement, delight, fun, mirth, sport" (OED "game," n. 1.1). This isn't how most characters take it, though: some of them are uber-serious about playing, and are playing to win. One thing for us to think about, then, is whether this "game" is anything more than amusing or fun for us. Does it have a darker side?
The other cool part of the title is its subtitle: "A puzzle mystery." Have you ever seen another book with that in its title? We haven't either. So, what does this part of the title do? Well, it tells us what the genre of the book is - always a good thing - and it also tweaks that genre. This title says that the book isn't any old typical mystery. It's also a puzzle. While the book keeps secrets from the characters and the reader, readers always have more pieces to the puzzle than almost any one character does. Maybe we can solve it before the characters do!

OK, so there are three endings. That's kind of weird. However, maybe it's fitting for the game-within-a-game structure of the book. Untying such a complicated concoction takes more than one ending.
But before we talk about them more, beware: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. (If you haven't finished reading the book, you might want to save this section for later! Head back to "What's up with the Title?" or check out "Quotes and Thoughts" while you finish the puzzle.)
In ending one, Turtle solves the mystery, and the other characters go about their lives. She's the winner but no one else knows it. While this might not seem like much of a prize - apart from the $200 million, that is - it suits Turtle just fine. She's good at keeping secrets, and she won the game fair and square.
Ending two takes us to peek into the characters' lives five years later, when some of them have figured everything out and some are still working on it. Everyone seems to be "growing up," though, even the adults: businesses are successful, people are getting married, and characters are seeing rewards for their good deeds.
In ending three, Turtle's with Westing when he dies for real, and she finally becomes the heir. What's most unusual about this ending, especially for a young adult book, is that we find out that several other major characters have died. The ending skips so many years ahead from when most of the game takes place that the thirteen-year-old heroine's a married businessperson. It makes sense that the book would have to get to this point, though, since the original game was tied to the "death" of Sam Westing, and the winner can't collect her prize until the inheritance becomes available.

The text can get a bit complicated, on a grammatical/word choice level, when the narrator switches rapidly back and forth between telling the story from several points of view, all the while keeping track of which characters know what, who's got a secret, and when the big reveal will be revealed. One great example of this comes in Chapter16, "The Third Bomb." After the bomb goes off during the bridal shower, many of the tenants gather in the lobby of Sunset Towers to meet with a police captain. Let's look at the dialogue that follows:
"Some game," Mr. Hoo grumbled, unwrapping a chocolate bar. One ulcer wasn't enough, Sam Westing had to give him three more. "Some game. The last one alive wins."
(Now, there's a likely suspect, Otis Amber thought. Hoo, the inventor; Hoo, the angry man, the madman.)
"The last one alive wins," Flora Baumbach repeated. "Oh my, what a terrible thing to say."
(Can't trust that dressmaker, Mr. Hoo thought. How come she's grinning at a time like this?) (16.21-24)
OK, so this scene is complicated, because Raskin rapidly cycles through several different characters' viewpoints. It's almost like editorial cuts between scenes in an action movie, where you can barely keep up with the shifting visuals placed in front of you. Even as one heir suspects one individual, that individual's suspecting another. We, and the heirs, don't know whom to trust. So we've got cool narrative structure, rapid character development, and plot untangling, all in one.
What this scene also reveals, if you're paying close attention, is who the murderer isn't. Unless Mr. Hoo and Otis are lying to themselves about any potential murdering they might have done, the fact that both of them are worried that the murder is one of the other tenants is a pretty good sign that neither of them is the killer.
Yet the scene's also perfectly clear. We know who thinks what, in what order, and we can keep up with the narrator in moving from one character's consciousness to another. It's almost polite. Raskin keeps throwing out clues and making even the most complicated moments, plot-wise, seem relatively straightforward. (By the way, for more on how some of lines in this chapter reveal ideas about lying and trickery in the text, check out our section on Quotes: "Lies and Deceit.")