The Comedy Is Finished

by Donald E. Westlake

Hardcover, 2012

Status

Available

Publication

Hard Case Crime (2012), Edition: First Edition, 320 pages

Description

The year is 1977, and America is finally getting over the nightmares of Watergate and Vietnam and the national hangover that was the 1960s. But not everyone is ready to let it go.  Not aging comedian Koo Davis, friend to generals and presidents and veteran of countless USO tours to buck up American troops in the field. And not the five remaining members of the self-proclaimed People's Revolutionary Army, who've decided that kidnapping Koo Davis would be the perfect way to bring their cause back to life... The final novel from the legendary Donald Westlake!

User reviews

LibraryThing member MikeRhode
Odd book, unpublished for 40 years, in which a Bob Hope-based character is kidnapped. Not the first Westlake one should read.
LibraryThing member dickmanikowski
Yet another book that I read further into before abandoning than I should have. I've enjoyed Westlake's novels about Dortmunder and his gang of misfit thieves, but this was an earlier novel that Westlake wasn't pleased with. He gave the unpublished manuscript to a friend, who had it published after
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Westlake's death. The friend should have trusted Westlake's judgment in this case.
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LibraryThing member ritaer
Because of its history this book reads as slightly dated. It was completed in the early 80s but put aside unpublished until 2012. The protagonist, a fictional comedian who is kidnapped by a group of political radicals, seems like a blend of Bob Hope and Jack Benny. The radical group is handicapped
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by the fact that each member has their own agenda while Koo Davis is trying only to survive his ordeal and the FBI agent in charge of the case is hoping that a successful conclusion will return him to Washington with his career back on track.
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LibraryThing member DaveWilde
“The Comedy is Finished” is Westlake’s final masterpiece. It is an incredibly well-crafted tale that stitches together storylines about fame and fortune, kidnapping, the end of the sixties, and the loss of ideals. It is a stupendous work and it is a novel that thoroughly transcends the world
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of crime fiction. That being said, I must concede that the first time I tried reading it I found it dull and pointless. This one was clearly worth a second try.

It is the story of a man, a comedian, Koo Davis, well-known for his USO tours to Korea and Vietnam. He is a symbol of American patriotism and flag-waving and the like. His personal life, however, consists of numerous affairs with whatever blonde dancers accompanied his tours of duty, a female manager whose relationship with him was closer to him than that of his wife, who he rarely saw, and little connection to his sons as well, whose careers had carried them on different paths than his.
Davis runs into a bit of trouble when a group of ex- sixties radicals akin the Weatherman or Patty Hearst’s SLA decide to kidnap the symbol of All-American patriotism and hold him as a political prisoner, demanding the release of ten so-called political prisoners who they want flown to Algeria. Just as Davis’ life has wound down over the years, becoming an empty caricature of what it once was, these radicals in this post-Watergate late seventies world are a caricature of the free love/end war hippies of the sixties who had degenerated over time into nutty bands of anti-government radicals who repeated stock phrases and hated the capitalistic world, envisioning something, anything, better.
It is a story, not just a crime fiction tale, of the general moods of our society during the turbulent seventies as idealism crashed and burned and morphed into things that Sgt. Pepper would barely understand.

As mentioned previously, it can be, for some, a difficult novel to begin as it is wildly unlike most of what Hard Case Crime publishes. It is not hardboiled detective fiction. Nor does it have much in the way of a noir feel to it. Nevertheless, it is an excellent novel and truly worth a read.
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LibraryThing member ikeman100
This was my first book by Westlake. Most of his books are fun and light crime novels. This one was not. It was very good. really enjoyed it. I have since read a couple of his lighter Dortmunder crime novels. They are light and funny. Westlake has a great sense of humor.

Language

Original language

English
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