Now that's interesting. I started reading the seventh Parker novel yesterday, The Split. I'm up to chapter two, and Westlake has just used the exact same sentence to describe an aspect of Parker's physical appearance as he used in Point Blank/The Hunter: "His hands looked like they'd been molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins."
So what does that signify? Was that laziness on Westlake's part? Maybe the grind of pumping out six Parker novels in three years – not to mention the three or four (at least) other novels he wrote during that period – was getting to him. Or did he forget he used the same phrase before? Answers on a postcard, please.
As for The Split's predecessor, The Jugger, I really liked it, particularly the way Parker's too-neat resolution completely unravelled in the final few pages, leaving him as high and dry as he was at the start of Point Blank. Still, as Parker himself notes philosophically, and to quote Vonnegut Jr.: so it goes.
I believe the author probably repeated that phrase as a nod to the readers, to see if they’d notice. I often do that in my seminal oeuvre, ‘The O Men’. Stephen King often 'winks' to his 'constant reader'.
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