Thank you kindly. This is just a taste. I have 58 books by Donald Westlake. Including four copies of Kahawa alone and a signed first edition. Those early Parker paperbacks with the Richard Stark name only are very collectible and pretty valuable.

A friend of mine interviewed Westlake way late in his career, a couple years before he died.  He was STILL worried, sometimes rightly so, about manuscripts being rejected.  Jeez, I know he wasn’t perfect, but over his decades-long career, not one of his scores of novels was uninteresting, or unsellable...

As soon as I saw the headline I came here for the Darwyn Cooke content.

Gibson’s not physically imposing but I thought he had the gravitas for the character in Payback. Downey just doesn’t look like someone who anybody (especially other crooks) would find threatening.

Yeah, Hot Rock is pretty good on its own, but casting the preternaturally handsome and charismatic Robert Redford at the height of his powers as the ultimate sad sack Dortmunder is about as serious a case of miscasting as John Wayne playing Genghis Kahn.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Statham one. I have seen Slayground.

Best adaptation we are ever going to get of Parker.

I haven’t seen miscasting like this since the last time they cast the role of Parker. That would be Jason Statham, the movie itself was okay if you had no idea what the source material was but a short English guy is not even close to Parker. I’ve been begging for a few years that one of the streaming services take a…

Like others have said, RDJ seems a bad fit for Parker.  But he could work as Parker’s sort of friend Alan Grofield, who was a part time actor and outgoing.  Haven’t got around to reading them, but Westlake did some spin off novels staring him as well.  

Having not watched the anime (but somewhat familiar with it), we really liked the live-action show. It was goofy, but it was also energetic and fun and really entertaining. The fact that Netflix dropped it so abruptly was a big bummer.

Appears I’ve been banished to the greys after many years here...I wonder if it has to do with posting things like how the GMG Union is on strike right now...

Netflix announced the cancellation quickly because otherwise the cast/crew would be waiting to find out if they were getting a second season or not. They cant tell the cast/crew its canceled without having an announcement planned because then someone will leak it before it can be announced.

Yeah - Hot Rock is the best of the many Dortmunder adaptations - and why the hell not, William Goldman did the screenplay and the cast really works. (That is, Redford is no Westlake reader’s idea of Dortmunder, but he does nail the put-upon, sort of hangdog attitude of Dortmunder.)

Obligatory “I don’t see it” casting comment. Downey is a wonderful actor (historically), but it’s been decades since he played a character other than RDJ on screen. Parker, as written, is the exact opposite of the charismatic, fast-talking, smarmy characters Downey has come to embody. He’s also (cue the Tom…

I like Robert Downey Jr. but I cannot not not see him as Parker. 

I don’t have a good feeling about this. I’d feel better is they were doing the Dortmunder series (Downey would be a good Andy Kelp), but Parker, I don’t see it. Parker is a serious - deadly serious - character. No wise-cracking, no jokes. And intimidating as all hell. I don’t see Downey playing that character.

Even weirder, the Dortmunder books evolved out of a Parker book that just kept being funny. 

The Hot Rock really is great as a fun heist movie and also just a blast as one thing leads to another, and then another, etc.
There are a few more Parker adaptations that sometimes slip under the radar because he tends to get renamed for some reason.
One of the best of those is The Outfit, with Robert Duvall, Joe Don…

Yes!

The really wild thing is that outside the Parker series, Westlake’s books are hilarious Coen Brothers-esque caper stories where a bunch of dimwitted crooks try a job way beyond their capabilities and bumble into success against all odds. That he also had a dark, disturbed, not even anti-hero but straight up villain…