Trent,
Re your question below:
> Does anyone know of an interview or introduction written by Westlake where he discusses how an attempted Parker became The Hot Rock?
There are excerpts from an interview with Westlake here:
http://claywriting.blogspot.com/2009/01/rip-donald-e-westlake.html
in which he discusses the how he got the notion of having Parker steal the same thing over and over again to see how the character, who deals badly with frustration would handle it, but decided that it was too comedic a notion for Parker, and so created Dortmunder, instead.
There's another Dortmunder/Parker connection. In the Dortmunder novel JIMMY THE KID, Dortmunder and his crew, against Dortmunder's better judgment, pull a kidnapping caper using a novel by Richard Stark called CHILD HEIST, which feature a professional criminal named Parker, as their blueprint. Needless to say, it doesn't work out for Dortmunder as well as it does for Parker (in a book that doesn't really exist in the Parker series).
JIM DOHERTY
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