Did this inspire the Columbo series?

There is no doubt Levinson and Link were fans of Hitch.😷

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Indeed, Levinson and Link brought to Hitch the book for his final film -- Family Plot. They had been offered the novel(The Rainbird Pattern), felt it was more of a "Hitchcock story." They took lunch with him and pitched the book and he bought it and made this as his final film. It has little to do with Columbo style mystery, though.

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Another similarity with Colombo is that you know early on who the villain is, and the rest of the story deals with how he ends up getting caught.

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I strongly believe that Columbo was influenced by Dial M for Murder. Levinson and Link first brought Columbo to the Broadway stage(just like Dial M) in Prescription Murder: with Joseph Cotton as the killer and Thomas Mitchell as Columbo.

Interesting: Joseph Cotton(my computer always misspells his last name, sorry) was a true Hitchcock villain, and Ray Milland -- the killer of Dial M -- actually played a Columbo killer himself! Milland also took a non-killer supporting role to the episode in which Robert Culp was the killer. (Actually, one of the THREE Columbo episodes where Culp was the killer.)

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The character of Columbo was created by William Link, who said that Columbo was partially inspired by the Crime and Punishment character Porfiry Petrovich as well as G. K. Chesterton's humble cleric-detective Father Brown. Other sources claim Columbo's character is also influenced by Inspector Fichet from the French suspense-thriller film Les Diaboliques (1955).

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I see all of those influences in terms of the detective Columbo himself(for instance, the inspector in Les Diaboliques is a bit of a slob) but honestly, I think that the entire Dial M PLOT is the template for the Columbo series: a first half hour or so of "plotting the perfect crime" and then the detective shows up to play cat and mouse, with a final "gotcha" clue(the key on the staircase.)

ANOTHER Hitchcock detective inspired Columbo, I think: Martin Balsam's private detective Arbogast in Psycho, who engages Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in a game of "Columbo cat and mouse"(catching Norman in lie after lie while remaining quite agreeable and amiable.) The difference between Arbogast and Columbo of course, is that Arbogast does so well at figuring out the crime that...he gets killed before he can catch the killer.